[paul]

Originally Posted by freeflyer

if were talking natural placement its not all about unique content.. in fact very little of it is. Despite the old saying 'content is king' its not exactly true anymore.

You can get to the first page of google for a competitive term with hardly any IBL's and with little content in the pages, without spamming or breaching any guidelines. Seeing as you already know good HTML and presumably have a degree of common sense it wont be that difficult.

But, you have an e-commerce web site hosting i'm guessing ? E-commerce sites are inherent in their nature that they can put a stop to a good placings unless you put measures in place to stop it. This can be tricky and time consuming, especially after the event, and its too much to go into here unfortunately.

In such situation, I think instead of targeting very competitive term one should focus more on local search terms, the adword geo-targeting might be one of the method which can be used to target specific demography. Also one should evaluate few advertisement option that can bring new business, for example if you sell custom T shirts, people wearing your t-shirt walking around advertise for you! that is just one example how online advertisement can be submerged with offline promotions.