Sometimes, the rules for SEO just aren't as hard and fast as one might think. Partly, this is because those rules are always changing and what worked last year probably doesn't work as well today. With that being said, though, I can still attest to the fact that the search engines still look for strong, relevant content as their primary requisite for ranking. Your job, as the site owner, is to make sure that the content is not only there but easy for the search spiders to find easily.

To illustrate this a bit, let me tell you about a site I designed several years ago as part of my genealogy hobby. It's a stand alone site, focusing on one location and stands in direct competition with another site for that same area that is part of a national project. I'll call my site Site A and the other one Site B.

Site A has few incoming links and has a Page Rank of 3. Site B has lots of incoming links (mostly because of being part of a larger project) and has a Page Rank of 4. Both sites have a large number of pages of information and neither gets updated very often (my bad!). Since inbound links and content ar such an important part of page ranking, one would think that Site B would have the upper hand and the higher ranking, right? Wrong! Site A is sitting happily at the number 1 spot in Google, Yahoo and Bing for its primary search term while Site B hangs at number 2.

So why isn't Site B doing better than Site A? There several reasons for that, the two most glaring of which are a lack of metatags and a lack of adequate navigation. Of these two, the lack of navigation is probably hurting the site more as the search engines spiders seem to pay much less attention to metatags than they used to. By contrast, Site A has a consistent navigation system and metatags on every page and a functional sitemap. These little details do make a difference!