Site optimisation now more important vs page optimisation?

[Hissingsid]

I've been pondering why one result in SERPs in my niche is occurring. The appearance of this unexpected high rank listing for the top $ two word term started around the same time as Webmaster tools started listing Keyword Significance.

Keyword Significance is a measure of the significance of that word in the whole SITE. If you drill down the tool gives you occurrences in the SITE.

Given that we know that Google uses the data that it has and if it thinks that the data is important enough to actually tell us about it I'm wondering if this is an indication that sitewide topicality is becoming more important as a factor in the ranking of individual pages.

If it is then it would explain the unexpected result I mentioned above. I'm hoping that others here might be able to either confirm what I'm seeing from their own observations of disprove my hypothesis.

Cheers

Sid

[BradleyT]

Wikipedia, BBC, Yahoo Answers are all examples of sites that don't have a site wide topic but still dominate.

[martinibuster]

What Wikipedia, BBC, and Yahoo Answers have are a breadth of coverage of the keyword, the variations of the keyword, the longtail of it. In my opinion, site optimisation it isn't and hasn't been. It can be seen that way, though. But imo it's really Keyword Variation.

[Simsi]

What Wikipedia, BBC, and Yahoo Answers have are a breadth of coverage of the keyword, the variations of the keyword, the longtail of it.

...and a shedload of inbound links.

Just looked in my niche HissingSid and can't see any evidence of that but I may check a less competitive niche where IBL's are less common tmrrw.