I have been looking at my year end web stats and doing some evaluating of natural search results this week.  I was surprised to learn that after only a year and a half of launching my site that I am now on the first page of Google for all my most important search terms 

I sell in two communities in the St. Louis area and took a lesson from my favorite web guru (Michael Russer) last year and tried to focus on specific terms that were most relevant.  I didn't bother with "st louis real estate" or any of the larger metro terms.  Instead I focused on the two communities where I sell (Webster Groves and Kirkwood) which happen to be in my site name "websterkirkwood.com".

My primary focus was on very targeted key words and content though I have to admit I have not updated my site in many months (which I will be doing soon).  Anyway for all the terms people actually use (except the elusive "Kirkwood MO real estate" where I'm not on page 1 for Google but am #1 for msn and others) I am almost always on page one.  And often I'm the first "real" site after you get past all the national listing aggregators such as Homes.com and the like.

I then read over all my SEO research and files as I'm going to try to get ranked for even more terms in 2008.  I kept coming across the old "google page rank" topic over and over again.  It seems like all the SEO "experts" still often talk about ranking as if it were the golden goose. 

Well I only have a page rank of 2.  Yep, it's a whopping 2/10.  But I rank on the first page of Google for over 100 extremely relevant terms (that according to my site stats people actually use) and for other search engines I am in the #1 spot for many of these same terms. 

So my question is does Page Rank even matter anymore? 

I use to see some of the top sites say they would trade links for anyone with a page rank over 5.  That seemed to be how they determined if your site was even relevant.  So I didn't really bother linking with anyone after researching the work involved and all the complications with "bad neighborhoods."'

I'd be curious to hear how those of you with top sites are getting noticed.  Do you think it's linking, page rank, key words, etc.  Or is it just that you have great content and are getting natural search results.

I think that more and more Google doesn't give a hoot about anything but targeted content and that in the future that's all the will matter.  So based on my experience I would say to heck with a lot of the SEO tallyhoo and just work on having a great site.  The rest seems pretty unimportant anymore (thank goodness).

Am I wrong?