Ok, so i have a relatively new site, have optimised it by the book, gone for human content over keyword stuffing & dodgy tricks etc.

although listed, my site is nowhere to be seen in the relevant keyword searches,(sandboxed i suppose?)

so anyway, this morning im analysing the top ten sites on those searches to see what theyre doing better, and the number one site has no meta tags, no keywords and is using an image as their front page, (and on most pages in fact)

there are several other similar sites high in the searches with extremely low keyword densities, no repeats, & generally not optimised at all, but regular top ten search performers.

how does that work??

im also fairly sure its not by large traffic volumes to these sites, as its a fairly niche area we're in.

anyone throw any light on what theyre doing?

ok i realise this was a bit ambigous so heres the link to the actual google search i speak of

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tri...utf-8&oe=utf-8

it's not the sponsored link www.tribiza.com ...which is mine (please dont click it from the google search!! ) ...but the one below that.

There is a page of text, but no meta keywords, no backlinks at all to that page, and only 20 to the homepage (and 15 of them are from their own sites)

wanting to know how they achieve that ranking bigtime.

one good link.

the homepage of the site is < REMOVED ON REQUEST > is PR 5 and has a link to that page in the menu bar with the anchor test 'triathlon camps'.

There are probable a number of other factor like it being a old trust domain, but that is the main reason.

for most search engines, nowadays meta tags are not important.
link popularity with keword in the backlink anchor text is more important for searchengines like google.

cool, thx guys. back to all my links again i suppose...