Writing for search engines?

I?m tired of listening to stuff like content is the king and it will rule big time blah blah.I have a perfect site with magnetic copy wheras my competitor has a crappy site with long tail keywords placed in Site title, H1, H2 and in the copies which makes no sense at all. Their plus point is probably a video on the home page with sales pitch (the only thing I can think of to keep people stay on the site for longer). The site has exact match domain (I know, big advantage) but only 16 backlinks. Not that they are from high PR sites or something. They have been on number 1 position for 3 years now. Google update have come and gone but their ranking never dropped. It?s making me really frustrated. Should I just start writing for the engines and forget about end users? Phew.

They are at the top probably because they have a few decent links and dont spam the crap out of their site.

It is called competition that is what you are faced with you have to find a way to outrank them...

And the more quality content you add to your site will ensure eventually, that you outrank them...

Although it seems tough right now it will pay off long term...

Of course even if you have stellar content, it won't rank unless it can be associated with the keywords you're trying to rank for.