fathom - 10:31 pm on Mar 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

It is rather pointless attempting to analysis a competitor is see how they rank higher than you unless you consider "all variables".

Even "Dave's Top 10 list" does not cut it.

PageRank by itself is simply a "measurement" and alot like determining how smart a person is by measuring their hat size.

Consider this as a war. The battle field is Google's index, and each variable for good ranking is are the battles that you must win in order to defeat the enemy (your competition).

If 100 battles will hands down win the war... considering only a few... defeats the purpose of going to war.

The list of "must" considerations... including content, good professional copy, minimum and maximum total words, keyword positioning (on the page), word density for specific words, anchor text (internal & external), similar content in promitity of anchors (internal & external), relationship of adjacent pages, number of internal pages, internal link structure, file size, validation, H Tags (and proper use), bold, italic, meta titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, title attributes, alt tags in image links, number of inbound external links, quality of external link (PageRank, sharing of PageRank, and Passed PageRank), theme of external sites linking, outbound links to authority sites, domain name, domain name of linking sites, external inbound links of linking sites (who's linking to them and the quality of those links), even distribution of link through site, number of out-going links per page, competitiveness of keyword or keyphrase... and a bunch more.

Each of these is important and none will do the job itself.

Note: if you are attempting to target something that your site in it's current form can not compete with others current forms -- your task will be in vain.