Vinny's thought-provoking post is a good read. His point is that neither PPC nor incoming links are great at determining what to show when you search on a keyword, since both are fairly arbitrary measures of the real value of a website. Being rich or well-known doesn't necessarily make you a better person - it's rather your worth to the people you are in contact with. And since websites are like people (at least for those who spend enough time thinking about them :), we can take this happy moral lesson across.

The people your website is in contact with are your users, and the website's worth is determined by the experience they have on it. If they reach a reach a conversion point, its hopefully been a good experience - they've started off with a keyword and ended up with a goal acheived. That, really, is the only true way to rank any given set of sites for a keyword - their usefulness in acheiving a goal. And Google Analytics is designed to measure just that - how users move through your site to their goal point.

So then, how long before Google Analytics becomes the biggest affiliate network?