How to get higher than well established site in the search engine?

The question is: What to do to beat well established site, that been in the search engines for years?

I've been building backlinks, articles in my niche and got to the 2d place in my keywords, but can't beat one site, that has been in the net for many years. However that site does not have any page rank, neither mine. Any suggestions? building more backlinks? i have over 100 good backlinks from articles and directories, the competitve site has less than 20 (and just directories. nothing specail)..

Please, any advices?

I could just be down to age, google does favour good sites that have been around for a while. Just do all you can to make your site as relevant as possible with a good number of quality backlinks

One of the reasons can be that the competitors site must be having good content as well as must be designed in a SEO friendly manner. The second thing what you can do is that do some competitor analysis of keywords and the structure of the site.

Why don't you to continue to build links, see if you can get links from indusrty sources as well. Maybe have a blog on your site to have regularly updated content and pull in more links.

What tool are you using to monitor backlinks, it may be that it hasn't registered all your competitors links yet. Try using a couple of different ones like LinkScape and Majestic SEO as well, and that should give you a pretty good idea of all their links. Then try and get the same ones as them as well. Also review their onsite optimization and compare to yours and see where it differs.

Analyze the #1 site with a fine tooth comb.
- See what kind of content they have and find ways to make your content better and different.
- Look for an area that they don't cover and you can excel in. - See which content of theirs is being linked to the most and create content that is better than theirs. Contact the linking site and let them know you have a more solid resource.
- try varying your keywords a little to see if you can get the edge

Working to build a better resource than the #1 site will help you get the type (QUALITY) of links you need to overtake their position.

You say all your backlinks are from articles and directories. Do some reading and research on how valuable article spinning and getting general directory listings is. Your competitor likely has a couple of REAL links that are stronger than all your links in total.

well that site is probably older then yours but the truth is, its not very diferent. to beat it you need to keep doing what you normally did until now. if you keep doing seo, eventually you will beat it. do QUALITY seo not QUANTITY and you will beat it. GL

There are two very different websites I've tried to help promote.
For number 1, there are 2,470,000 results for its keywords, and number 2, there are 14,700,000 results for its keywords.

None of them were on the first page when I started doing something about it (actually website 2 was barely created, while no 1 was at least 10 years old), and some of the higher positioned websites looked like very hard to beat. And had a lot of $ to spend on SEO, while the owners of the websites I tried to help didn't (they're both startups struggling to get some business).

For number 1, what I did was listing in the local citation pages, and optimized what I could on page (edited titles, removed other meta tags, corrected errors and broken links).

It ended on the first page on position four and it stays there, above the main competitor, although I haven't been doing anything for almost a year.

Number two was taken cared of by the owner who followed my advice and put fresh, original and well-written content very often. That content has been promoted on 3 social media networks, and that website is on position 8 page 1 and moves down slightly when fresh content doesn't show up in time for a while.
There isn't any other on-page optimization, actually the site is a mess from the on-page SEO point of view. It hasn't been included in local citation pages, and ranks for local keywords.

The first website has a few backlinks, one of which seems to be very valuable, and the latter only the ones from promoting the new content.

So I'd say high quality, original content kicks a$$.

As you mentioned that you have been building backlinks, articles and other off page works but still you can't beat your competitors. I can suggest you to optimize and update your metatags and homepage contents. This should include your important keywords in title, description and the homepage content. After achieving this you can just continue the the submission work.

Hope this will work better as one of my friend faced the same problem with his business.

Thanks.

There's a lot of crap in this thread that will cause you to waste your time.

There's also some gems.

They're not hard at all to tell the difference between them.

It's not the age of your site that is holding you back. It's the quality of the SEO work you've done so far compared to that of the other site. That's not your fault - it's because of all the mis-information twonks like to spread across the internet because they don't know any better themselves.

But all that aside, you may not need to outrank them. What do you offer that they don't? What would make people click your listing even if you were 2nd? Find a way to work that in your title element without jeopardizing your rank, and you could find #2 to be the better money maker than #1.