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You're just not looking quite hard enough then. When I click on their "Shop By Brand" Velux category, that has a bit of text, well written, title and meta description are decent, then you click past that to Velux Centre-Pivot Roof Windows and once again, more content, mostly text.

You get into the actual product pages at some point, and they include a decent content set, but upon first glance you'll notice that most of that content is duplicated between "like" products.  Have no worries though, because they are using the canonical tag to point all "similar" products back to a single product of that type, so that duplicate content doesn't war against itself.  It looks like from every category page that includes products, they are pointing all of the products canonical tag back to what I assume is the most popular size.

So where you're seeing content that isn't great, I'm seeing enough content that is "good enough" to be considered great due to the quantity, and the organization of it. Not to mention, it seems like behind the scenes they've actually tried very hard to make sure every page is geared towards targeting specific terms. Therefore, they aren't spreading themselves thin.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, you ask, what are they doing that is so great compared to the others (like Wickes and so on), and I see them doing a lot better. But you can't just look at the site. You have to dig into their source code. For instance, Wickes is allowing their site to eat itself stupidly by having similar pages pointing to themselves via the canonical tag, as opposed to pointing identical products (other than in size) to a single item like the site you mention does.

I compete in a similar "home improvement" industry and we are up against sites like this all the time. Our issue is that we cover a specific "niche" within this industry and many of our competitors do it all, and we're constantly battling their "quantity of decent/ok content" vs. our "quality and more focused content".

Like you, we also have a superior link profile to most of our competitors, but I often assume it's their content that gets us. We tried to offset that by being the only company in our industry with a blog, but we just ended up cannibalizing ourselves to the point that I think we'll have to ditch it soon.

I agree, when you glance at OSE, and only OSE, it could make you scratch your head.  However, I look at their volume of content and there is TONS of it, it's well organized, relevant, well written and legit.  As I went through the first two pages for the term velux windows (via Google US) I'm seeing it competing with the big boys like HomeDepot, Ebay, as well as a slew of "informational" authority sites that touch on the topic.

Moral of the story, I suspect it would be an example of "content is king".  They may not have the link profile others in the industry have, but they sure as hell have a boat load of content, all related to windows.  They have over 1,000's in stock, which leads me to believe their site has 1,000's of pages of related content.

I didn't dig deeper, but just by looking at the little bit I checked out, I assume each page is highly targeted and that their handling their business "on-page" which is probably why they rank well.

Then again, you may have already come to that same conclusion.

My guess would be NO. Now don't quote me on that for sure, but after visiting their site, to me it smells of a link network like GhostRank (that Matt Cutts and cronies just demolished) and that (a) YES, it would absolutely improve your rankings for a bit but (b) that once it's found it will surely get you an email from Google Webmaster Tools stating that they have found some shady links in your profile.  Granted the (b) scenario isn't as bad as it sounds as they usually just notify you they won't be counting them anymore, but that does not in any way look above board.

When it comes to shady link aquisition which I assume this could be classified under, I think it's always better not to take part. At best you'll get a small boost for a while (maybe even a big one), but it will be short lived because at some point those links will be devalued and you run the risk of getting your site hurt.

And it's kind of like pi$$ing into the wind to some extent.

GhostRank also claimed their links were white-hat. And believe me when I say they weren't.

I mean, part of their sales pitch is "Rank Any Site With Our Quality 100% Safe BackLinks"

I've never heard of a reputable SEO firm claim you can rank any site through their link building efforts. It's just not a claim in the SEO world you can make, at least not for the price they are doing the links for.

$50 for any link building plan is rarely ever going to help you.  However, I suspect you're just pushing SEOMaximus' service and that this post will be yanked as it smells of spam to me.

Doug, our issues were that we just weren't careful enough when writing up each blog post and what we were targeting. We ended up having blog posts competing for terms that we only wanted our actual ecommerce site (and the pages within) to rank for.

Now what is also interesting, is that via the blog, we ended up ranking for a couple of odd "low hanging fruit" terms that turned into gold. So rather than 301-redirect them to a more suitable "category" page and target the category page to those terms, we just further optimized the blog post, but featured products on it and so on. We did this mostly out of fear of losing those rankings if we jacked with "the good thing".

So with the blog, it's really just a simple case of keyword cannibalization and we've been working on formulating a plan to ditch the WordPress blog and move its valuable content into the actual site.  The blog does sit on the same domain as the site (site is domain.com, blog is domain.com/blog/) so we figure, we'll transition from having a blog, to having more "educational/information" pages in the site. I think this will allow us to better utilize these pages for the greater good of our site in terms of improved interlinking, using them to help improve conversions and so on.

Most of the blog is fluff anyway, and isn't really benefiting us the way we hoped, so I suspect we'll actually see a decent jump in position for various terms because the site and blog won't be competing against each other anymore.

Sorry to not be more informative on that topic, but the issues we are seeing is a very clear and textbook case of our site eating itself for dinner. Something which can very easily be fixed by simply back-tracking and by being more careful in the future.

I think this you're over-thinking it on this one personally.  I think that if you simply write the URL based on what you think will be most useful to your visitor, without making it over-complicated that you'll be fine. If there is benefit to be had, having the keywords there in a simple manner will give you that benefit, but you'll be spinning wheels if you spend too much time on it.

I think you'd be fine cutting out words. We always cut unnecessary words out of the URL as you mentioned doing above simply to keep the URL's a bit shorter.

I know it's cliche, but if you write the URL so it make sense to the visitor, without being over-complicated and spammy, then I think that's the best way to get whatever strength may be available to be passed by "the google machine".

I have in fact seen a slow down in performance but it depends on how and where you're placing them. I don't think the slow down has ever been enough to have an impact on your rankings, but I've seen situations where it would annoy a visitor.

I've had better luck using the 3rd party services like AddThis or ShareThis.  Sure they have limitations, but for me at least they seem to perform a bit better in terms of speed than if you're using Facebook or Twitter's tools directly (and separately).

In the world of link building, cheap is almost never effective in the long run. Quality link building by its nature is almost never cheap.  If you're looking for cheap, the best thing to do would be to do it yourself. Otherwise you'll have to shell out some decent money in order to get the job done right for you.

A ton of people within this community, us included, provide link building services. I never plug link building services simply because it's a very personal thing. Not everyone's service will fit your particular business model.

You could private message me your details and needs and I could possibly point you in the right direction, whether that be point you to a couple of places we outsource to, or maybe we could help you directly.

But in the end, if you're budget is super-tight, maybe it would be better to be "consulted" on how you can best spend your own time building links. For companies that have very minimal link building budgets, I find just an hour or three of consulting time on how they can effectively link build on their own almost always pays off the best for them.

In most platforms we work with, the "retail" pricing and descriptions are all the spiders see, because the wholesale pricing is hidden from the general public and is only presented when a wholesale customer "logs into the site".

To pitch the "wholesale side" you would simply optimize a page or pages for the terms relating to wholesale coffee you want to rank for.  There would be no need for the "wholesale prices or info" to be crawled in that case.  Only the pages pitching your wholesale program would get crawled.

Now many make the mistake of creating two separate sites, and in that case, you run the risk of them competing against each other which is bad for rankings.

Assuming they have literature, webinars or other things available as part of their service, you could make some of that info available for free to bloggers or others within the industry and could possibly request they provide the public with a review of the quality of the material.

And beyond that, if they've really successfully coached some people into great lives and incomes, maybe those happy people would be willing to provide links from their web properties to the site, with a thanks, or a review of the work they do or so on.