I'm doing some keyword research right now and am finding in some cases that there are multiple listings by the site ezinearticles.com ranking for a particular search term. If I were to write an article based on this search time and submit it to ezinearticles.com, is there any way to boost my placement amongst the other articles from that site, or will it always be grouped together like that? In many cases I notice there is a 'see more results from ezinearticles.com' under three or so listings, so I want to create an article that is above the rest. If I managed to get some links from other sites outside of ezinearticles (say I wrote an article and published it on hubpages, squidoo, etc) and linked back to my article published by ezinearticles.com, would that help to boost that particular article's ranking?
Submit some articles on Ezinearticles.com with 2 links back to your domain. Along with that rewrite those articles that you submitted to ezine and submit it again to other article directories such as goarticles.com, articlebase. Use these directories to send a link back to your ezine article and another one to your domain. you can also do some link building around your ezine articles: blog comments, linkwheel. This should be enough to outrank the other articles.
Yes, I have tried that with some success. You will most likely be ranked before those other articles while yours is new in the eyes of G. After that you'll need to add a few backlinks to push it back above those other articles. For most niche's it is an easy task.