Google does not use the keywords meta tag

[seymourjames +]

No hurt feelings at all.

By the way I think I do know what is possible - I have a PhD in Computational mathematics - I joke not. The bottom line is that there are algorithms out there which are quite capable of deciphering what your site is about and making decisions based on that content which will consistently out perform a human up (up to a certain point - read about the Turing test). They had AI systems 25 years ago that would get close to beating a doctor on diagnosing your medical condition. How also do you think security systems work? Thousands of people listening in personally 24x7? Don't think so. And multilingual speech recognition is a much more difficult problem than analyzing the context and semantics of a web site. Nobody is saying that links are not important. I am simply saying the obvious:

Don't believe the hype! Get great content as your priority. Get links naturally which are of quality. I think I explained what 'quality means'. Buying hundreds of links from worthless directories is not only a waste of time but will harm your site's credibility. Do you really think a search engine is going to let you spam your way to the top?

You need great content and then you will find it easier to get links naturally. Links are a signal to a search engine that there is content to be had and if worthy provide a vote for your site. If a search engine gets to your site and finds rubbish (pages of duplicate or valueless content) then you will not be scored well. At least not for very long. A search engine uses hundreds of variables to rank your site. These are not just a pure count of straightforward attributes but many of those variables are derived after an analysis has been made. If it were completely dominated by links then the web would return rubbish on nearly any search you made. The spammers would have won years ago on every single search term of any worth.

So please - just agree to disagree as I first proposed.