Planet13 - 7:58 pm on Jan 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

@ tedster:

...especially if it is reinforced with internal anchor text on the home page pointing to the internal page.

Thanks for pointing this out. Yes, our home page has the desired keyword in the title AND in anchor text pointing toward the desired landing page.

This also reminds me of a point you made a year or so ago about how you got a particular page to rank better for a keyword by including that keyword in anchor text linking OUT of that landing page to another internal page. So I think we can assume that OUTBOUND anchor text MIGHT under certain situations have a moderate influence on how a page ranks? (This is going on memory so I hope I am not mistaken in that belief.)

...and the actual landing page for "widget software" didn't rank well until it accumulated a number of good backlinks. Until then, only the home page ranked.

Well, that might be something of the missing link here (pardon the pun).

Now that I think about it, the desired landing page is in "competition" with TWO pages; the home page (as mentioned above), and another page that is more or less titled "Blue Widgets Meanings and Variations"

That later page (Blue Widgets Meanings and Variations) is actually our MOST POPULAR landing page, but the search term that it draws is "Blue Widgets Meanings".

So maybe having two pages in competition is a bit of a problem?