First Link Priority question - image/logo in header links to homepage

[dcutt]

I have not found a clear answer to this particular aspect of the "first link priority" discussion, so wanted to ask here.

Noble Samurai (makers of Market Samurai seo software) just posted a video discussing this topic and referencing specifically a use case example where when you disable all the css and view the page the way google sees it, many times companies use an image/logo in their header which links to their homepage. In my case, if you visit our site you can see the logo linking back to the homepage, which is present on every page within the site. When you disable the styling and view the site in a linear path, the logo is the first link.  I'd love for our first link to our homepage include a primary keyword phrase anchor text.

Noble Samurai (presumably seo experts) posted a video explaining this specifically http://www.noblesamurai.com/blog/market-samurai/website-optimization-first-link-priority-2306 and their suggested code implementations to "fix" it http://www.noblesamurai.com/first-link-priority-templates which use CSS and/or javascript to alter the way it is presented to the spiders.

My web developer referred me to google's webmaster central:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353 where they seem to indicate that this would be attempting to hide text / links.

Is this a good or bad thing to do?

[AdamThompson]

That's a bad thing. Use an alt tag instead. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBLvn_WkDJ4

[CPU]

Just because someone uses a term such as samurai, ninja, rockstar or the like as part of their name doesn't actually make them any better or even right.

The first external link on a page has been shown in some testing to be given more weighting than remaining links but this is for external links not internal links. So in theory you want to be the first external link on a site linking to yours.

I have not come across the above suggestion as a best practice and if you check the sites of a number of big name SEO's they haven't done this and if it was a best practice you would expect them to.