A lot of SEM Experts are defending their craft as it comes under attack from PPC marketers and the like. The SEM crowd is launching SEO contests to show just how hard it is to rank well in the serps.

I have even written articles about using best practices page design to increase you overall seo effectiveness. I actually believed all of that too, untill just recently.

A search on Google for “website design” (without quotations) produces on average around 548,000,000 results. That is pretty stiff competition. Lately, there has been one site that has been showing up in the top 10 search results for that term and it is really baffling me. I have watched this site push down a website that I thought was a pillar of the website design community. They were always a level 10 search results company. I have also watched some other killer sites get pushed down further in the serps due to this new comer.

So, I figure I should go take a look and see what makes this site so special. I open the page from the serps and view the source code where I expect to find all of the key ingredients added just right. To my suprise, I find the following;

1. Relevant Title Tag.
2. No Description Tag.
3. No Keywords (noone really uses them anyway).
4. 22 Images and not a single alt tag.
5. No CSS Sheet because all of the style information is viewable (gasp).
6. No Headings tags to give relavance to a particular keyword.
7. A measley PR4.
8. 82 Total words in the file.
9. SEOMoz Page Strength of 3.5 (Not a major player).
10. Domain Tools SEO Text Browser SEO strength of 66%.

With all this not going for it, how the hell did it make it into the top 10 for such a competetive term? It’s all in the links folks. After looking at this site, I have to believe SEO is nothing more than leveraging well placed reciprocal links. We currently rank #7 for website design and I’ll be damned if we let this site kick us down. I might get a lot of crap for making this post, but how else can you explain it?