Links. It all comes down to them. Whether earned, bought, baited. Don't even need a proper title and headers (of course they are essential, and will get you ranked much faster).
And about links, if you want quantity and cheap price then go India. If you want something of true value, then it's either hard pain sticking work, or a very blown out of proportion expensive, western SEO firm. Get them related/unrelated. Stripped out of content or contextual. They all help.
Get enough high PR (I hate PR, when I mean PR, that means sites that have a lot of quality backlinks pointing to them. I simply hate when people say, wow I got PR3 and I'm #1. YOU CAN BE PR0 and be no1 if you do enough work between those pesky PR updates) unrelated sites , and you'll outrank even your branded competitors who only get links from the related sites.
Spam doesn't work? It sure does if you find the right do-follow high PR (again that damn PR
) blogs.
What about anchor text diversity? Well friends, I was a true believer of that, until I saw a gambling site, using the same anchor over and over on all of their Sponsored Reviews. Got them penalized you say? WRONG. Got them ranked in top 20 within 6 months on those tough gambling keywords.
So to conclude, the most important thing about SEO :
Read less blogs, get more links
Cheers,
Kal