Marcia - 6:12 am on Jul 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

>>if there was no such thing as SEO then all content would be ranked on a level playing field and googles' job would be alot easier.

Exactly. And it's for that very reason the easiest way to try to figure out what's working and what isn't is to look not at very highly competitive searches, but low_medium to moderately competitive ones, where the majority of the results are less likely to be skewed by aggressive SEO efforts.