Well, don't know what you have access to, but most people can only fidle with search engine optimization because they don't have full access to the WEB/SQL server.
For instances I own a WEB/SQL server and my web server is trully optimized and I force all web sites to follow strict guidelines to avoid slow downs, also my IIS6 is compressing all pages (static and dynamic) so the pages sent to clients are smaller in sizer so loading faster, also my SQL server is set to check/optimize/backup all DB's on a daily basis.
I have a piece of ASP code somewhere, where you can invoke a SQL server database optimization, have to look for it.