I came across two interesting and very different posts today.
The first
33 Website Success Metrics Instead of Rankings, Google PageRank and Traffic dismisses ranking as a KPI against a wide variety of other metrics, e.g bounce rate, backlinks, alexa rank, delicious bookmarks, tweets, and Technorati mentions.
The other is a great analysis of the 3 gigs or so of data that AOL released into the wild (briefly) a while back, showing the clickthrough rate per rank
Serp clickthrough rates.
In brief, the no. 1 site got 42% of the clicks, the no. 2 site got 12%, the no. 3 site got 8% – you get the picture.

Anything ranking below 10 gets the scraps.
Now I would never argue that a sites ranking is the be all and end of of success, but you’ve got to be at least in the game to get anywhere, and while I think that some social media activity is healthy for most sites, being found in Google is still up there with the top priorities for any serious website.
SEO Expert
August 21st, 2007
I posted in March 2006 that I was ranked Number 1 in Yahoo, MSN, and Altavista for the search term “Ecommerce Consultant”. My rankings have hovered in the top few on all engines since then, but I thought it was time for an update. I’m still number one in Altavista, Number 1 in Yahoo.co.uk, I’ve slipped to 6/7 in MSN (must look at that), but I’ve made it to number 4 in Google.co.uk. That’s top 6 in ranking in all the major search engines for my main keywords. Anyone need an SEO Expert ?
SEO Consultant
March 7th, 2006
So, today I am
No. 1 for the search “Ecommerce Consultant” in Yahoo
No. 1 for the search “Ecommerce Consultant” in MSN
No. 1 for the search “Ecommerce Consultant” in Altavista
All these are global results, not UK only.
Ecommerce Consultant being my main targeted keyword as it best describes what I do – note its not some made up phrase that no-one searches for
Still working on world domination with Google, but I know why… If you need an SEO Consultant, I am available for hire…
No 1 in Yahoo!
March 4th, 2006

Internet and Ecommerce Consultant Emma Kane – This is nice – I’m ranking number one in Yahoo for “ecommerce consultant”. I’m working on Google….
Google Search Engine Optimization Tricks
December 1st, 2005
Google Search Engine Optimization TricksEnter just the word http for your search to find the top 1000 PageRanked sites.Enter only www in your search to see how Google ranks the top 1,000 sites.Manually type the following prefixes and note their utility: