Anatomy Of A Top Ranking Web page

 Optimizing web pages for high rankings in the search engines involved two main processes. Firstly there is the on-page factors which include what keywords you place where on the page itself. The second, and more important process is getting the off-page factors right - incoming links.

This article explores mainly the on-page factors. As the competition for a keyword phrase increases, off-page factors become more important to good rankings and these often mask the effects of on-page factors making it impossible to see what on-page factors are important. For this reason, I am going to look at a high ranking page with low levels of competition in Google.

First, let's consider what we mean by competition.

There are two ways to look at competition in Google. There is the competition a page has when you type the phrase with quotes, and the competition when you type the words without quotes. The number of results returned by Google in each case is YOUR competition.

The main differences between these two types of search are as follows:

Search with Quotes - this returns only those pages that have been "optimized" for the exact phrase.

Search without Quotes - this returns all pages that have been "optimized" for the words making up the phrase.

e.g. (in simple terms)

a) If you search Google for

alsatian dog

Google returns 41,000 competing pages.

b) If you search Google for

"alsatian dog"

Google returns 6,390 competing pages.

In (a) above, there are 41,000 pages that refer to alsatian AND dog, but not necessarily to alsatian dog.

In (b) above, there are 6,390 pages that refer to the exact phrase alsatian dog.

Now, if you want to rank well for the term "alsatian dog" on Google, you only have to compete with 6,390 other pages for this exact term.

However, there are 41,000 - 6,390 = 34,610 other pages that are related to this search, and might still beat you if Google sees them as more relevant than your page.

We have discussed before the importance of link reputation and PR in ranking. It is possible for a high PR page to rank well for a term like alsatian dog, even if it does not have the exact phrase on the page.

This fact clouds the issue somewhat, and so although I recommend searching with quotes to find the real competition, I also recommend that you look at the top few results in Google (as searched without quotes) to determine how important those "partial match" pages are.