I always thought it was the content of the site that was most important ;)
Even if this sort of thing works to outsmart Google (yeah, right), it can only serve to further ruin the whole search engine experience. If your content doesn't rank number one, what right does your site have to to the status? The worst part about searching for things these days is that you do sometimes wind up with sites like this that have a whole subdomain dedicated to one of your keywords, but nothing to do with your search query as a whole.
I guess this sort of answer is probably not that popular, since "SEO" has become so pervasive, and ad-money is often more important than information; everyone is just trying to "keep up" with the other cheaters :) Just some thoughts from a non-"SEO-hungry" webmaster.