How do some sites rank

[izwar]

I finally feel like i have a solid grasp of SEO, but then i see some sites that are ranked top 5 for keywords and i see no seo strategies. I dont see keywords within body, i see flash navigation menues, etc etc.

for example this site

http://www.dirtbagclothing.com/

they rank extremly high for anything with skateboard, and clothing together. They only show about 50 back links on google which are the ones that count form my understanding, and they have flahs nav, and i cant see any keywords within body text. I only see keywords in title tag which i know is very important.
any clarification as to how this happens?

[Chris]

What keywords exactly?

[izwar]

skate clothes, skateboard clothes, skate clothing skate board clothing.

it was jus an example site i found and was wondering.

[Selkirk]

Grab the "Search Status" and "SEO for firefox" extensions. These can help you slice and dice information about a site. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ is a better way to look for inbound links. it shows 4,000 inbound links to that url. Google doesn't show all the links it knows about. You may find page strength (http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php?url=dirtbagclothing.com) interesting.

[izwar]

the links that show up in google, are those the ones that contribute to the page rank only as those are what i thought are most important.

[Cutter]

looks to me like they have some pretty high quality backlinks:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dirtbagclothing.com&bwm=i&searchbwm=Explore+URL

[izwar]

right i noticed that, but the page is not optimized for SEO what so ever there are no heading tags, barely even any text with keywords i looked for perhaps them using text as same color as BG and nothing, onylthing that looks normal is there text navigation links, so the only thing that is helping them get their rankins is their title tag and their strong backlinks i presume. I guess that shows how important back links are compared to everything else.

[Torito]

Yep, day after day reality shows that it all comes down to high quality links in the end.