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Dave.
There are many factors that go into ranking, one of the most important, hand in hand with inbound links, is hierarchy of information. I kind of go into some detail in this thread [webmasterworld.com] about hierarchy.
I've always believed that a working knowledge of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, plus some W3C Kung Fu can lift your site up in the serps like you wouldn't believe.
Really.
The latter is usually far more competitive, check the number of results returned by the two searches. So to do well with the unquoted search you must optimize much more. With Google links help a lot, as does the anchor text in said links.
Dave.
And if so, is there text before or after those title tags?
Let me also say that keywrd2 is the word "at", so Google doesn't even take that word into account when searched for!
Ahaa! That (to my mind) clarifies things a lot. You have the phrase kw1 at kw2 which may, in quotes, be very uncommon. Without the quotes you are competing with all the kw1 kw2 sites.
I thought out the following example:
world at play with no quotes, has 5,880,000 matches, none of the top 10 have the ignored word "at" in the title.
"world at play" has only 266 matches.
Repeatin using Google Advanced serach with 100 results per page, the search without quotes had only one result with the exact phrase in the top 100 (as far as I cared to search). So the page ranking #2 for the exact match was not amongst the first 100 without quotes.
how on earth could there by that HUGE a discrepancy between the two?
It is perfectly possible to be #1 out of 266 matches and be nowhere when competing with 5,880,000 :)
If you want to rank for real-world serps check out the hierarchy structure threads and link development threads. These are the fundamentals for getting up there in the serps.
This might sound like heresy to some, but if you get those right you really don't have to worry about nailing the anchor text optimization except for very competitive phrases where everybody else is doing it as well.
Mohamed_E.."keywrd1 at keywrd" does make sense as a phrase though. I mean, I am getting traffic from it, but I would likely be getting at least 10 times more visitors from that search if it was not in quotations. For my keyphrase, with the quotations there are 258,000 results. Without the quotations there are 9,690,000 results.
martinibuster...I have read that thread you gave me on hierarchical theory. I have to admit it did not make a whole lot of sense to me! Are you saying that I would have better luck if I did not include the word "at" in my title tag? Would it also improve if I reduced the number of words in my title tag?
Thanks!
Dave.
Are you saying that I would have better luck if I did not include the word "at" in my title tag? Would it also improve if I reduced the number of words in my title tag?
I think there's a 70 character limit after which there's a diminished effect. This relates to hierarchy (a series of ordered groupings of things).
Most algorithms make the assumption that the thing that comes FIRST is more important than the thing that comes LAST. So, that's why you put the most important paragraphs/content at the top of the page. At the bottom of the page you'll find the items that are the least important (not unimportant- just the least important).
The same goes for the title tag. The first words of the title tag are the most important- the last words are the least. That's why many people opt to put the company name last within the title tag.
If you go to the Worldwide web consortium web site and click around their tutorials of how to create proper html, using all the elements and CSS, you will learn how to create a properly optimized web site that will score for a variety of keyword phrases. The reason it will score so well is because you would have learned how to order your ideas upon the page- using all the tools that html has to offer.
It's like writing a College Paper- where you structure your ideas on a page. The first sentence of a paragraph signifies what the rest of the paragraph is going to be about- the body text amplifies and becomes more detailed about various aspects, then the last sentence of the paragraph is a general summation, etc.
The same principles of ordered hierarchy apply to the web page. The reason is because the algo is trying to define what your page is about. In order to define it, it looks for patterns, ORDER, and emphasis, things that signify what your page is about.
What you are trying to do is CLARIFY what your page is about- along the way suppressing other meanings that may accidentally obscure the real meaning of your page.
What you are NOT trying to do is seed keywords in the title tag, add a bold here and there in order to get to the top- This works against you because you are not satisfying what the algo is looking for- which is to understand what your page is about.
Once you get the hang of doing that, then you can play around with the anchor text stuff- I'm not too fond of it because it can be overdone to the point where there's no effect. And you can get a whole lot further, IMO, with grasping the above stuff first, then tackling the other things.
Above all, remember that you are constructing a page for the robots AND the surfer. It has to be attractive and clear to both. You've seen those sloppy web pages where the keyword is repeated over and over on a web page as long as your arm? It may rank every once in awhile but I have never stayed more than two seconds on one. Why? Because they forgot to design for the surfer.
