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Please suggest examples whose SERP have "off-the-page" factors that are very similar, such as similar PageRank, and similar website size. Please exclude keyword-phrases where the SERP have multiple domains owned by the same person.
This will hopefully leave examples where subtle "on-the-page" differences are most responsible for the ranking position. I'm hoping that could provide a fertile area to study and learn, especially if the results are all good examples of very competitively optimized structure.
Thank you.
For my own keywords, I'm faced with a tremendous variation in the sites that rank on the first two pages. There's very little to be learned from my own category. Some are big .edu or .gov, PageRanks are 4 to 7, some have hundreds of incoming links, some have very few. For HTML elements, there is great variability in whether keywords appear in titles, headings, etc. Some are deep sites with navigation internal-links on every page, others are really small sites.
So that's why I hope someone can suggest a good example of a keyword-phrase with more homogeneous SE results, to make it easier to compare and learn.
Please don't be afraid to post, even if your examples aren't perfect.
- "orlando villa", seems a highly competitive niche. All results have fairly similar pagerank, most have keywords in their domain name. But the keyword density in the title seems higher than usual? What do you think?
- "free screensaver", is apparently a rather popular search term, but some of the results seem to be governed by off-the-page factors.
Other suggestions?
This will hopefully leave examples where subtle "on-the-page" differences are most responsible for the ranking position. I'm hoping that could provide a fertile area to study and learn, especially if the results are all good examples of very competitively optimized structure.
I think your assumption is somewhat flawed. The general rule of thumb is that the more competitive a particular phrase is, the less of a role on-the-page criteria plays. Using popular, competitive terms to try and analyze on-the-page factors simply doesn't work.
What I've found to work better when trying to analyze page factors for Google is to try and start with more obscure terms, and then do some test searches both with and without quotes.
If you spend some time looking at the differences in page counts, and the percentages of excerpts that display an exact match, you can find page sets that have much more consistant on-page factors.
At the other extreme, obscure keywords may not offer a sufficient "survival of the fittest" environment to show clear patterns of "evolutionary fitness" in the optimization for SERP.
Maybe we need keywords that are less-common but not too obscure, and from sectors where people don't naturally want to link to each other, because of taboo topics (death, toilet... I'm struggling for ideas, as you can see)
WebGuerilla (or others), could you give some examples, or perhaps suggests topics where you've learned successfully
Start at 5 and work up [down?] to 5555555555.
This gives a nice illustration of the importance of a keyword in the domain name, superceding a keyword elswhere in a URL.
But the titles are unnaturally short, and the numbers position in the titles is unnatural, prefering first or last position. These tend to be internal pages of obscure sites, and there are probably lots of reasons why one could learn the wrong lessons from studying pure number keywords.
How about keyword examples where humans have intervened to hasten the natural selection process by optimizing their pages, to a fairly similar degree. One could learn faster there, don't you think?
WebGuerilla, in your post above, you suggested paying attention to page counts. I didn't understand this. Can you elaborate?
