Primary vs. Secondary Keywords

Secondary words ranked well, primary not...any advice?

[mmmtweak]

I work for a company that provides numerous websites related to a specific industry. We try and optimize each site for roughly ten keywords each. Upon analyzing the majority of our sites that aren't getting ranked particularly well for the first three keywords, I have noticed some congruent occurences. Doing manual searches in Google shows that typically the first three keywords show up in the page 3 results and that keywords' 4-10 yield page 1 results. Granted, having 7 out of our 10 keywords show a page 1 result is great (I'm not complaining) however lately for these sites we just can't seem to get over the hump of getting our top three keywords ranked in a highly visible fashion. Looking at the keyword density usually reveals that at least the first and second keyword phrases have densities above 10% and that all the others reside around the 3% range. This seems to be a consitent factor among all such sites that I'm describing. Here are some possible reasons that I have come up with for our problem:

1. Our top 2 or 3 keyword phrases are too popular, hence short of incorporating more conent to each page, we'll never really get ranked for them.

2. Our keyword densities for those top 3 are too high.

I realize that links and content play a big factor in all of this as well. As far as links go however, there really isn't any difference in the amount of links to these sites I'm describing and ones that are doing well across the board. If any of you have any ideas or similar experiences with this type of phenomenon please post. Sticky me for examples of urls.
Thanks everyone.

[paladin]

It sounds like your top 3 keywords have much more competition in Google than the other 7.

Let's assume for a second that you are trying to optimize for all 10 of your keywords equaly. The less competition in a specific Keyword, the higher the ranking in Google for it.

From what you stated that would be my guess.

Good Luck
Alon