Can I beat an Ezine article to no 1 spot with an ordinary website?

If you're trying to beat EZA'a home page, they're very important.

But you aren't. You are trying to beat one article page, at least two clicks away from the home page.

Those numbers would mean a lot more if your were trying to beat a site like you are proposing to build. But for very large sites like EZA, not as much.

Yes with the right SEO you can beat it hands down. While I don't really agree with some of the statements made here - that having an EZA is a green signal (I had thought so earlier, till I realized that I myself use EZA, albeit infrequently, to create a second presence on the first page) - but still, having an EZA rrank #1 *may* be a good indication. But remember, you have to fight it out - may not happen soooooooooo easily (but will surely happen if you give a serious shot at it).

Jeremy, you said "....leverage EZA for traffic while you get your site where you want it to be." Can you explain how the leveraging is done please?

The backlinks all seem to be from articles. The format of these articles is always the same: 400 word article and then at the end "Read more about X here and X here" (With links out to 2 sites at the bottom).

Most of the backlinks are from sites that are PR0, except one which is PR3. Many of the articles are on blogs that are not relevent to the niche - they are blogs containing lots of different articles on completely different subjects. I wonder if this is the work of a backlinking company? If so they are getting 2 backlinks for every 400 word article they put up - this seems inefficient to me, does that sound right?

Given this information, you ought to win this battle without too much difficulty. Again, personally I am not sure that the word "relevant" backlink carries the same meaning to me as to many others, but get some high-PR and energized backlinks with the desired anchor text over a bit of time and you are going to win this game without much sweat. PErsonally I would not bother about relevant pages, but I would definitely bother about the pagerank of the pages that would link to me.

This is based more on experience than theory, but I can also explain the theory as to why it works this way.

Note: Most SEO knowledge is theory with a sprinkling of experience to support the theory.

OP is looking at Keyword A.

The guy in the article may or may not be targeting the same keyword. More often the guy who wrote the article is targeting Keyword B.

If the author of the article was trying to target Keyword A, his site should naturally rank above EZA, because he has more and better inbound links.

{And if it is a non-competitive keyword, then the author could very well have double-presence on the first page, and this is awesome if he can get it. I enjoy when I can achieve even more than a double-presence, and yes it can be done with article marketing.}

In the off-chance that the OP finds another keyword for which the EZA article ranks, that is typically an associated information-keyword, rather then the buy-keyword that the articles' author is targeting.

Those information-keywords typically go against pages that have no inbound link popularity on them, so they are easy to defeat by a committed participant.

The article has inbound link popularity from the EZA website, and those internal links do carry value, although not as much as external links carry.

The competitor that wants to replace that article at the top of the results, only needs enough third-party external links with link popularity to stand above the article page, which only has internal links with link popularity.

The value is much lower on internal links than external links, so the competitor has a much lower bar to rise up to.

I have followed these principles in some cases to outrank Wikipedia pages.

It can be done.