That was well said. I keep telling people that alexa does count. as does google and yahoo. Even the smaller engines like MSN, altavista and alltheweb.
This is what i keep trying to stress for people. They need to learn SEO the right way, even if they have to take a class from a "real" pro with proven results. SEO covers a lot of other marketing methods including articles, press releases, social bookmarking, onpage and if you are good at it, link bait.
All of these methods combined will produce traffic for right now, and also raise you in the search engines. so it is a double wammy.
Pay Per Click is also good if you know what you are doing and have the budget for it. there is definatly an art to PPC(adwords), and a novice should be ready to lose some cash when first starting. And if you do decide to use PPC, make sure you use analytics. This is vital, so you know where the buyers are coming from and where the shoppers are coming from.
As far as the marketing strategy of Youtube, these sites also hav an advantage of being first to do it, not because they are better than the copycats. But rather that people are creatures of habbit. they tend to frequent the same sites. This is vital to viral marketing and branding.
Having a top 10 position is not even relevent for youtube. Just like google taking over the search engine market. They branded search so hard that people do not even say "search for it" anymore, they say "Google It". Now that is branding!
And PPC is what brought Google to the top.
I visit webmasterworld and other top SEO and webmaster sites on occasion, but i am not a member of any of them, at least not an active menmber. there are too many "guru's" there that state things as fact when the fact is that it is an opinion.
I guesss the point of my post here is to let people know that you have to use all of the tools combined to get where you need to get.
Try driving a car with everything but a steering wheel. Or missing keys, or spark plugs.
you need the whole car.
Jim