I was reading an article over at:BruceClay.com about The Importance / Lack Of Importance In Being #1 For A Search Term.
I personally think people focus too much on being #1 for a keyword or two. I think people should instead focus on their users. Provide great content to your users. Some of my favorite blogs seem to just be. I don’t think they focus on ranking for certain keywords as much as they focus on making their users happy. I think metrics like the time the average user spends on your site, conversion rates, average page views, etc. are much more important that ranking on a specific keyword or overall traffic.
I compare this in a way to the fact that I can advertise nude photos of celebrities and make photos in photoshop, and I can get tons of traffic. That traffic will be useless. It will have zero stickiness ( no pun intended) and as soon as those people realize my sites content has nothing to do with what they are looking for, they will never be back again.
I would take one happy RSS subscriber who will blog about the great posts/articles on a particular site over 10,000 visitors looking for Angelina Jolie Naked Photos.
So my point is that being #1 for keywords is great, but it’s just a small part. Other things are just as important and in many cases more important.