New To Web Development Forum

There could well be something fishy going on :)

Try a few of the major things first.

1. Look at their pages in depth. View the source code and look for things in there. Perhaps there is hidden code or words.
2. Have a look at the cached version, if what you see is different from what they have on the main site chances are they are cloaking.
3. Take a peek at the backlinks and visit those pages and see what text is being use. Eg “blue hollow widgets” as the lining text is better than “click here”. Those backlinks will likely as not provide opportunities for you to get links from. See who links to the backlinks and approach then also.

Studying other peoples pages is a great way to pick up new things, secondary to spending a lot of time reading the various forums that are full of good information.

when you search in google for "blue green widgets with holes" you'll get sites listed that have all or some of those words on them in any order, which is why you see 2.3 million results. if you do the same search using speech marks (the EXACT TERM), you'll see fewer results.

if someone has the exact search term "blue green widgets with holes" and the domain name "blue-green-widgets-with-holes.com" and the search term is in the title / h1 / page content etc etc etc etc then the page will stand a good chance of being seen as "the most relevant page" for that search and could therefore come top very easily.

>>Is it a case of just biding my time until I'm proficient enough at
>>this game to understand the way it's done

yes. stick around webmasterworld and read, read and read some more. the more you read, the more you learn. the more you learn, the better you do. go back through old threads and check the library and FAQs etc.