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.
A quick search at:
http://www.prsearch.net/
for alsatian dog, shows me that the top pages for this search
without quotes have a low PR (0-3) and many of those pages
have 0 incoming links.
The same search at PRSearch.net using quotes around the phrase
show very similar results. The competing pages for the exact
term have low PR and low incoming links.
This phrase should be easy to target and get top rankings
if done properly.
A word of warning: Because the PR reported on the Google
toolbar is out of date (see earlier), you cannot be 100% sure
of the PR of the pages, even using a site like PRSearch. They
will use the same formula that the toolbar uses, and so will
be equally out of date. Only Google knows the exact PR it
is using in its ranking for any one page.
A second check I often do is to check what the PR of the
homepage of the site that is ranking well, as this gives me
an indication of how important the site as a whole is. For
the phrase alsatian dog (with or without quotes), the top
page is:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/alsatian.html
The homepage
http://www.castleofspirits.com
has a PR of 6 - quite an important site.
However, there is no link to the alsatian page on the homepage,
so the PR 6 homepage wont directly help towards the high ranking
of the alsatian dog web page.
Doing a backward links check on Google does not help since
there are no backlinks listed for this top ranking page.
OK, putting on my detective hat, I see a link at the bottom
of the Alsatian page called "March 02 Ghost Stories". There
is another link to "Ghost Story Page".
Clicking on the link to Ghost Story Page, I am taken to a
PR 5 page:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/storypg.html
where I find a link to March 2002 Ghost Stories. Clicking
that link takes me to a PR 3 page:
http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/mch2002.html
And on this page I find a link to Ghostly Alsatian dog.
So, the top ranking alsatian dog page has one link I know
of from a PR 3 page. I might assume that this site also has
a sitemap (although I cannot find one) where it contains a
second link to the alsatian dog page. That means a total of
2 links, both internal.
I can assume from this that the alsatian page with a PR 2
is probably the correct PR, and the page itself has very few
incoming links. I am confident that if I targeted the phrase
alsatian dog, I would easily get a top ranking.
The phrase alsatian dog is therefore an EASY phrase to target.
As a final check I went to the searchguild difficulty tool
mentioned in section 6 of this newsletter and typed my phrase
into that. The Search Guild rates this term as EASY.
With relatively few off-page factors contributing to the
high ranking of this page, I can only assume that the on-page
factors are what makes this page stand out from the rest and
rank at number 1 on Google.
There are a variety of tools available for calculating density,
but I use a tool I wrote for myself and is not available for
purchase.
Running this URL through my tool tells me a lot of useful
information.
Density of the phrase "alsatian dog" on the page is 0.49%
The keyword is found ONCE in the title (11.11%), and TWICE
in the main text on the page (a density of just 0.34%).
The keyword is not found in any header or meta tag!
As a second check I always look at what I call the partial
density. That is the sum of the densities of all words that
make up the phrase.
e.g. the phrase "alsatian dog" is made up of two words -
alsatian AND dog. I look at the density of alsatian, and the
density of dog, and combine the two densities.
This is useful because it tells me the density on the page
of the words that make up the phrase (remember it is possible
to rank well without the exact phrase on the page) - a kind
of simplified page reputation.
The partial density of this page is 3.09%, made up of 7 occurrences
of alsatian, and 12 occurrences of dog. This page is obviously
about alsatians and dogs!
Let's look at the prominence of this phrase on the page.
First an explanation of what prominence means.
Prominence is a measure of where on the page a word exists.
A prominence of 100 would mean it was the first word on the
page.
A prominence of 1 would indicate it was the last word on
the page.
A prominence of 50% would indicate it was the middle word
on the page.
If the phrase was the first word (100% prominence) and the
last word (1% prominence) on the page, the average prominence
on the page would be about 50%. That means the keywords are
well spread out on the page. As prominence increases, the
keyword is found higher up the page, as it decreases, it is
found lower down the page.
For analysis of top ranking pages, I look at not only the
average prominence of ALL occurrences of the phrase on my
page
i.e. how the keywords are spaced out on the page,
but also the prominence of the first occurrence on the page.
i.e. how close to the start of the document is the phrase
first found?
The prominence of the first occurrence of the phrase alsatian
dog is 99.67%. That means it is almost the first phrase on
the page (only the word ghost comes before it).
The average prominence of the whole page for this term is
62.62%. That means that the keywords are distributed more
in the upper portion of the page. Haven't I always told you
that it was important to get your main keyword in the top
one-third of the page?.
This page is a good one to study. It shows a top ranking
page for a low competitive keyword phrase. Because of the
low competition,
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