Good ranking for main phrases - but not for secondary phrases

[George2006]

Dear All,

My site doing well (first page in Google) for main search phrases (10K-20K searches a month for each phrase) but my niche is very spread so there are a lot of "second tier" phrases (around 1K searches a month fro each phrase) and my site is not doing so well there.

Even if I take a phrase (6-7 words appeared together, relevant to my niche) from one of my pages and try to search for it in a Google my site comes up ranked 40-70. Considering that I have exact phrase on my site I find it strange that other sites that do have those words but not together still come up first.

The page I took the phrase from has decent PR=5.

Example: if I search for "How do I install wide green widgets" (no quotes). Then my page with exact that phrase comes up far bellow pages that only have "install wide green widgets" words separately

So what can be done to improve the situation?

thanks

[tedster]

This is an interesting evolution in Google. When a search phrase doesn't have quotes around it, more and more the rankings have tended away from word proximity and order as major factors. You see this most dramatically in longer phrases. I can only assume this is intentional, a step taken in response to various measures of user satisfaction. Google does have semantic technology that identifies shorter phrases that appear commonly as "one unit of meaning", and such phrases tend not to get broken down quite so frequently.

So what to do? Be attentive and intelligent about all the relevance signals - anchor text, title elements, etc. And beyond that, as with almost everything Google, backlinks and PageRank are a big deal in helping your url to outrank other urls that have the same words, even though in a different order and not in ideal proximity.

[Miamacs]

anchor text, title elements

And that's that.

Unless you're the only one seeing a generic connection between your 'main' and 'minor' phrases, and they're in fact apples and oranges to Google, you should be fine after correcting the above two.
Although I'd make sure you have the stuff in your body text as well. Perhaps in the META description.

...

As tedster mentioned, these are the basics, so you better get them right. I bet your nav is crippled, and your title doesn't really include anything that you want to rank for.

[jk3210]

What do you see when you try the same search WITH quotes?

[George2006]

What do you see when you try the same search WITH quotes

With quotes ny site comes up if not first then at least in first 3. Google does not have much choice when i am using quotes :)