By Accident or By Design

In the last week or so, I've been tweaking things with my site (http://www.ujjwal.net/), with the result that I'm now at #1 for the Google search "ujjwal". I also have high results on some other engines (notably Lycos), while I don't figure anywhere in the picture for some others (sadly, Yahoo!).

It is said that Search Engine Optimization(a.k.a. SEO) is a pretty difficult and unpredictable task, and they say that seeing results in times as less as a week is almost impossible.

What have I been upto?

Several things:

• Google Sitemaps
  
• Adding keywords and descriptions meta-tags to my pages (some of them already had it)
  
• Publishing my website URL on various profiles that I have, including Opera, Orkut, Blogger among others.
  

I'm still wondering which among these is responsible for improving the ranking of my page in the search results. Notably, my PageRank on the Google toolbar still says 0.

I'm still working on improving the content on my site, and retaining the #1 ranking as long as possible.

Please let me know of other tips to improve search engine rankings. I'll keep my efforts updated on this blog.