You can search any day of the week on SEO and find a hundred experts telling you the exact opposite of each other. There is a lot of fighting and wrangling amongst SEO experts on many topics.
The reason ‘experts’ can say the exact opposite of each other is because it’s all minutiae that they are fighting about.
The largest pieces of search engine optimization are all well known to everyone in the field. The only thing left to fight about is the minor things. The minutiae makes all the difference in the world when fighting for a search term that receives 300,000 searches a day, but more than likely the terms you want to come up #1 for are not in that class.
So let’s focus on the basics for a few minutes, because the basics can get you to the top of Google.
Build a site that has rich content and people want to link to.
Do on-site optimization that uses your researched keywords.
Get some people to link to you using facebook, twitter, digg, stumbleupon, etc.
So don’t stress about things like page load time, reciprocal linking, the exact percentage of your keyword density, sitemaps, link neighborhood, anchor text, page rank, etc.*
Just build a good site that is on topic and people want to use and your site will come up.
*These things do matter when all added up. Don’t try to cheat and you should be OK. If you are thinking about cheating (buying links, stuffing keywords, hiring a shitty SEO company that spammed you) Please, Please consider giving me a call and discussing your situation first.
here is an article from LifeHacker that I also agree with. http://digg.com/d3XrD
Another re-enforcement that it’s minutia from Matt Cutts recent blog post:
I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. — all the factors that you probably think about all the time. Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/?
Now that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter at all. My wife is constantly reminding me it’s the little things that set us apart in the world, and she is right (as usual).