Compensation for domain age? (SEO questions)

With the little info its dificult to pinpoint but ill give you the short answers for the short questions.

1. Yes it is, and also yes it is. The domain age is nice, but the older backlinks are nicer, they may not be on point but they are YEARS old backlinks as well.

2. Younger sites compensate by getting older.

Really the things you can do to compensate for the age factor, they can do just as well.

There are MANY things that go into the total score for a website for a select keyword including

Page Title
Meta Tags
Body of the page (the text)
Do you have the keywords you desire listed at least once in between <h1> or <h2> tags?
The age of the domain
Sites that link to the domain
The names of images
The alt text of those images on your page
The names of external and internal page links

How much actual content you have on your website. Obviously the more, the better. If you have 257 pages of text and they have 254 in theory your site would be more relevant. But then you have the other factors to contend with, which are listed above.

So even though there are things you could do to improve your ranking, he will always have the bonus of age so just be better at all the other things. Have more and better, higher quality content than he does.

Make sure you have the most optimized title, meta tags, body text and image alt tags on your pages. That kind of thing.

Let's not forget file naming structure of the HTML file itself (www.me.com/keyword1/keyword2_brief.html), optimized header (h1,h2,h3,etc.) tags, title tags for links, providing Google, Yahoo, HTML sitemaps

And by title tags for links I don't mean the name between A tags, but rather the TITLE="" parameter.