How is it that SEO isnt just about following a set of rules to make your page rank higher than others? Its a competition between everyone and there are shortcuts and such that everyone wants to know about, even if they dont use them because the risks are too high. It does seem like a crazy kind of rat race, and the winners sometimes have the crappiest pages, aesthetically, and content wise. Granted its getting better with the content being more of what you were searching for instead of just the grabbag of words people put in their content tags...

I'm relatively new to the SEO scene,(I'm more into graphics or hardware) and I'd love to be more educated about SEO, so if you all would like to help me understand where my thinking is wrong, please do!

~r