It is no good having tonnes of back links pointing to a page that does not have content or more specifically relevant content.
There are a lot of black hat techniques which some SEO providers resort to for instant results. Whilst this may work for a one time event or seasonal product it will most likely resort in instant banning as soon as the Google finds out.
We recently had a marketing firm who wanted to give us £50 a month for a small British Gas banner and £15 an article for spiel on a new eco product. When we asked why they told us that a few websites were actually ranking above them for their own product using black hat techniques. To solve this the marketing company were willing to pay 1000 websites with a good Google Page Rank to publish relevant content with backlinks on their homepage.
What this goes to show is how much being ranked highly for their own product is worth. They were willing to spend £75,000 to get the number one position back. Whilst they would not be expecting to recruit this directly back in web sales the view would be that being ranked behind a completely irrelevant site could potentially be bad for their image and their new product.
Having run websites and their SEO campaigns for 5 years i would say the most important aspects are:
- Content - It really is king, keep it fresh, detailed and varied
- Multiple link strategies - Links of one kind is good, but backlinks, blog posts, forum signatures are far better when combined.
- Keywords in the domain name really do make a massive difference when combined with relevant content, even .net are better than an irrelevant domains.