Is your link popularity that important to Google?

[Optima]

I worked on a web site ranking on the first page in Google. The "2 words" keyword is not include in the url and the PR for the site is only 5, most links being internal. The competion for that keyword? 2,880 for the exact term and 377,000 for a regular search. Have I optimized the page for that specific keyword? Yes but it wasn't my main focus since I had other keywords being more important on that page. (Yes I ranked fairly well for those too ;-)) It seems to me that Google is not paying that much attention to link popularity.

[vitaplease]

Congratulations,

and you did the right analysis, the exact search is what you should check for competitiveness. Try two word exact searches that have 300.000 results though, and you will see that the right links are crucial.

[Optima]

Which makes it more than obvious that what is the most important is the choice of keywords and their density on your page. Otherwise, how can you compete if you are launching a brand new <clip keyword> site as exemple?

[edited by: paynt at 9:28 pm (utc) on Mar. 29, 2003]
[edit reason] sorry, snipping keyword specifics [/edit]