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Content! If you write well, to communicate to the site user, you will do well.

You will also tend to naturally use crucial words/phrases which normally go with your main subject. (A page on a baseball game, for example, will naturally include team names, runs, pitchers, bats, balls, teams, stars, innings, etc.) Those will tend to serve as secondary keywords, which in turn makes the page appear on more searches.

I'm still looking for some working answers.

Yes, this just happened to me, too.  I don't know how long they keep them, though; maybe find out by trying the same thing later in the day, and a day, a week, a month later, and finding where it ends, or how quickly it changes from your own change of location (like, say, going from Long Island to Philly in a day).

As I'm finding out in helping other peoples' sites, there are no shortcuts to work at getting real links to real resources that will be of real assistance to those who use the page/site. Any dummy links or bought links will get a short burst, but will be caught.  Google has gotten a whole lot quicker at it (Bing less so), and assesses penalties for it.

"took a hit": like, permanently losing 25% directly upon Panda's US release, and another 12% upon its worldwide release.  It was quite obvious.

SEOmoz and GA show no evidence that rewritten pages do any better than the more-or-less static ones (no pages have been totally static). The three pages that are less than a year old have pretty much failed to register at all with Google, even though they're in the index, have social links and rate A w. SEOmoz page analysis. (This doesn't count devotionals.) Two of the pages are on what has become pretty much a hot topic in the media, too.

I'm hoping that the blog (coming in a few weeks) helps.  But I still need to know how to kill the site's overall downdraft - roughly 80 visitors a week lower each of the past 4 weeks.  And pages that have been top 10 are now dropping 10-20 positions from where they were, despite content and page analysis improvements.

Google Webmaster Tools shows when G reads the sitemap indexes; it may take a day or two to digest once it does read it. Until then the changes only matter once the viewer gets to the site.

That's not always the problem. I too have made recommended changes, and have gotten clobbered.  In my case, one such problem came with reducing the number of times the keyphrase is found in the document text. SEOmoz's page analysis is based strictly on count, not percentage. So mentioning it at least 4 times but no more than 14 is not a help on longer texts, or for that matter on some short ones. There's only so much I can do to use certain core words less often; beyond that, it becomes poor English, which would drive away users who come to the site. I would think Google accounts for that with some sort of text (not file) length keyword/phrase percentage in their algorithm, otherwise it would weigh solidly against authoritative pieces.  But on keywords in document, what's good for Google seems not to be good for Bing, and vice-versa. And recent changes in Google's algo (as reported on the SEOmoz monthly top 10 recently) may well make it even more sensitive to supposed spamming on keyphrase in document.

That's just one of several such problems. The engines have their own internal contradictions, too (Google re Google services and page speed, for one). You can't get rid of them all.

I guess that means that closing slash at the end of everything, too?  And is there a verifier on-line?

I noticed that many of SEOmoz' own pages, those that aren't XML, start off with a simple , without all the other stuff that's on top of nearly all other sites. Is there a reason behind this? Does it have to do with HTML5 instead of 4.1? Should this be done as a general rule, or is it situational?

I have a site, spirithome.com (despite the name, a non-com site), that for reasons I don't know took a hit with Panda, and has been drifting down ever since.  What can someone do to stop an overall slow drift down?  (PS: it just came off a predictable seasonal high; I'm talking of an overall picture.)

Thanks.  Did the server-level change, works great, the pages are having no problems resolving canonically, and the changes have been accounted for in Google and Bing's webmaster data since the 24th. Only, one other thing also happened at that same time: my site lurched downward another notch.

This is what usually happens when I do something that's been recommended by SEOs.

As I'm finding out in helping other peoples' sites, there are no shortcuts to work at getting real links to real resources that will be of real assistance to those who use the page/site. Any dummy links or bought links will get a short burst, but will be caught.  Google has gotten a whole lot quicker at it (Bing less so), and assesses penalties for it.

I'm still getting a bad canonical problem, even with every page having a rel="canonical". It even shows up in SEOmoz's stats, with it indexing 300+ pages when there's only 180-odd.  Trouble is, the .htaccess file says "FrontPage" not Apache.  Would your .htaccess thingy for Apache work there?  And is it the .htaccess that's in the url's folder with the rest of the site's regular files, or one that's in a prev. folder?

Yes, this just happened to me, too.  I don't know how long they keep them, though; maybe find out by trying the same thing later in the day, and a day, a week, a month later, and finding where it ends, or how quickly it changes from your own change of location (like, say, going from Long Island to Philly in a day).