The Internet is a massive encyclopedia of knowledge that millions of people have contributed to. The web is made up of billions of pages that are all linked together.  Some of those pages are linked to by thousands of others, while some are linked to by very few.  This is nothing new since it's the fundamental concept of the world wide web.

The search engines have looked at the Internet as a whole and have tried to figure out what pages are the most important.  Google, in particular, decided that each link is like a vote.  The more links that point to a page, the more important that page must be.  In addition to this, they've decided that a vote's worth is determined by how many pages link to it and so on.  They also look at how closely both pages relate to each other.  The closer their subjects are, the more valuable that link is.  Google calls this concept PageRank.

As with any sort of ranking algorithm, there's an underlying problem.  The pages and sites that are deemed important are shown to more people, which in turn makes them more important since more people will view them and potentially link to them.  This makes it so the sites that are on top stay on top, while the rest are left in the dust.

There are as many strategies to get somebody on the top of the search pages as there are people trying to get there.  What it ultimately boils down to is that a web site needs to generate some buzz  to break into the upper crust of the existing monolithic websites. Once a buzz gets started, more people will link to them, which generates more buzz. Over time, they'll reach the top of their prized keywords.

So how do you generate buzz?

There are many methods, but the one that I like the best is a technique I've coined Content Islands.