Ross Dunn at Search Engine Guide wrote an article titled Demystifying Your Competitor’s Ranking Success where he shares the secrets of dumbing down SEO in a step-by-step walktrough.

We have all been there, “how the heck do they always get #1?” It is a constant frustration for many a client and, well, even myself occasionally. The fact is that much of the time there are a few solid reasons behind the search engine success of any website and it is important to learn what these reasons are before trying to compete. How is this done? Therein lies the subject of this article; how do you determine what your competitor has done to win the search engine war?

Knowing your competitor’s strategy is important if you want to catch up with them. The tricks Ross shared are nothing new but most of us are lazy when it comes to technical stuff so I hope this would be a good reminder to keep us on track with our web ventures.

While the original Million Dollar Homepage focused on the idea of selling pixels, TagsPage is more of a Web 2.0 experiment with textual tags. It gives webmasters (and bloggers) a chance to promote their website (or blog) with their favorite keyword (tag). It’s a great for SEO since you get a high-quality backlink on your particular term. It also serves as a directory for random surfers to browse through. At $5 a character their prices are cheaper than the original Million Dollar Page, and their approach, we’d say, very worthwhile. And if you’re too cheap a little skeptical about this you can test the waters by posting your tag on their free pages.

Via Elliott Back.