Now, one way to learn SEO is to study the success of other SEO strategists.  Recently, SEO.com was no where to be seen on the Google search engine results, but now they are:

As you can tell, SEO.com is ranked number 10 for the highly competitive keyword.  Now, how did they do this? That is what this post will attempt to answer.

SEO.com’s BlackHat tactics

Currently, some believe that they have used a few unethical ways to achieve their current success.  The tactic that I linked to sums up their spam on Sphinn.com (an SEO and search related news site).  Now, this is certainly BlackHatSEO.  Although many social news sites use nofollow attributes in their links, Sphinn does not.  So, SEO.com essentially had some of their employees create multiple accounts at Sphinn and inject/force links to their site.

Buying links is BlackHat, but buying a site with links is not

After SEO.com was purchased, a huge buzz was found on many SEO and flat-out geek blogs about the purchase.  It sold for 5 million dollars.  Many of these blogs wrote up a little post — saying, “Wow, SEO.com sold for 5 million,” etc.  And of course, most (or many) of these blogs resulted on providing links directly to SEO.com.  (Technorati estimates 205 blog reactions for the site.)

And yes, of course, there were already links pointing to the domain before it was purchased.  Now, 15,100 links according to Yahoo.

Getting closer to a conclusion

With a site, with the perfect domain, and with near-perfect anchor text (hyperlinks pointing with either “seo.com” or “seo”), it leaves no wonder to my mind why they have received a 1st page ranking.

On-site SEO?

Ahh, glad you asked.  Neglecting all keywords with 2 characters and less (via GoogleRankings - Keyword Density)…

…they are certainly optimized.

Regarding other aspects:

• Their site is regularly updated (main page, as well) by showing snippets of each of their blog posts.
• Each of their pages stays on topic (mentions related terms — “search engine optimization”, etc.).
• Inner links very well.

Conclusion

This post is not meant to be rant but rather a way to look at sites that may be your potential competitor.

They’ve optimized well, and it appears to have been a great buy (according to their site):

After  4 ½ months with SEO.com our average monthly sales more than doubled. The decision to hire SEO.com has been one of the best we’ve made in launching our small business.