Hello Brian

I would just like to add a few points if I could :)

>I don't think UK Universities
>are doing this - of, indeed, would want to go down this route.

There are instances whereby it would be good for web devlopers to get together with people who are search engine savvy. A bit of forthought can make all the difference and avoid a huge and costly re-hash of a site. Full time consultancy would probably be a bit overboard but setting off down the right path can be a life saver. 

>> many companies selling search engine optimisation 
>>services probably use mainstream tools

In the SEO industry as with a great deal of other industries people that do the best jobs are one that do not ned to hard sell. As with all the CMS systems available and less recently, 1000's of web designers it is possible for anyone to "have a lash" but not really know what they are doing or indeed be any good at it. Go by referals or learn it yourself inhouse using some of the web forums that deal in just this industry.

>>Note that the search engine vendors tend to change their algorithms, so
>>even if you are highly rated at one point, there is no guarantee that
>>this position will be maintained.

This is true but not 100% applicable to a university website that is likely to be text content rich and as such keep its position high. Industries that watch the monthly unpdate cycle (eg Google dance) are the cut and thrust ones like viagra and casinos etc where a sinlge Pay Per Click can be US$20 and more. 


>>I guess it's because there are lots of links to the UKOLN Web site.

Spot on Brian. It is the off site anchor text that does it in most cases. It used to be a problem for Google when they were "bombded":
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1868395.stm

It is clear that this has and still is to an extent a problem for them, hence their montly  change in algorithm to try and filter out this and other problems. For example the context of the link is more important now in that a link from a site about mathematics to another mathematics site will add more weighting to the linked to site than one from football site.  


>>but having persistent looking URIs (is it sensible to
>>link to foo.ac.uk/depts/maths/ug/projects/.../ or
>>foo.ac.uk/~einstein/relativity.html), avoiding changing URI structures
>>(e.g. deploying a CMS which hides everything behind a query string).

You will find that the concensus is that people will be more likely to deep link (good) to a page that has a static looking URL as Brian suggest. CMS systems I have seen produce shockingly long urls with multiple parameters that do not allow for effective search engine crawling. Depending on what you are josting on you could employ (or get the CMS people) a mod_rewrite to make your urls static looking. If you do start to move pages around and change their urls you may need to employ server side redirects so that the search engines know that you have permanently moved a page. This is more of a problem when you have external sites still linking to the old url.

>>Also note that there are advantages in being linked to by popular Web
>>sites.

Not only do they drive traffic they also add to the whole link popularity. 

>>You may also find it useful to monitor your link popularity on a regular
>>basis.

A good delve into your log files offers a great insight into where your visitors are coming from and offers new sets of keywords which can be targeted.

Regards

Richard