Keywords or not?

Recently a client wrote me the following thoughts (my reply follows):

> A Google question.
> Since google doesn't give much for keywords (counts title and description)
> the important is incoming quality links to the site.
> Do you have any advise or have a proven method for that?
> Thanks and looking forward working with you and maybe develop a long
> business relationship.

On the contrary Google attaches lots of importance to keywords and in fact most of the search engines do and that's why more and more people want optimized, keywords-rich content on their pages. Think it this way: if you search for a particular keyword or key phrase, the search engine has to display you the page that talks about that keyword and key phrases without resorting to keyword-spamming. So to tell Google that your page is significant for a particular keyword, you need to have relevant content centered around that keyword.

Incoming quality links are good, but you can only get them if you have the relevant content on your website. I get quality links to my website by writing useful articles. When people put these articles on their websites, they link back to my website. Another method is, maintain a blog. If it becomes a high-traffic blog and if your website gets a link from their, this too improves your ranking.

Link exchange campaigns help but they don't do much good because one, they are randomly exchanged to improve ranking (that annoys the search engines), and two: some webmasters put your links in a database and then dynamically display them, which, what I know, renders them useless.