PR vs Keyword Density - which rules?

[itrainu]

I have been doing some analysis for a customers website and followed these steps: did keyword research starting with their suggestions, finding more at WordTracker, then analyzing their competitors keyword density to find more.

Came across some interesting information and am wondering if Page Rank really is the be all end all? Does it carry more weight than keyword density? There has been so much talk about content, content, content that I am wondering...

This is what I found: 6 websites, including my customer.
Company, PR, Density, count of #1 positions for good keywords
1, 6, med-poor, 9
2, 5, med-poor, 7
3, 5, excellent, 0
4, 5, med-poor, 6
5, 4, med-poor, 7
6, 0, excellent, 0

Good keyword density is defined as (for example) 60% for a 3 word phrase; several 3 word phrases at a high percent. Poor keyword density is the highest percentage being for irrelevant terms or single words.

My guesses at why this is so are that customer number 3, with the best keyword density going, has the same title on every page...just realized that is why the keyword density is so high! Customer 6, also with excellent keyword density, has a client side redirect (meta refresh I guess) and you land on a *.js page!

This analysis makes me realize how much detail there is to optimization! Any other ideas? I guess spiderability of site, # pages, quality of incoming links, # outgoing links...it never ends ;-) My client is #5 before optimization so hopefully we can improve on this rather easily :-)

itrainu

[Fischerlaender]

If I had to decide between PR and keyword density, I would choose the anchor text of incoming links as the number one parameter for top rankings.

[Mohamed_E]

Looking for the "magic bullet" is a waste of time, Google was explicitly designed not to have a magic bullet. In the basic paper [www7.scu.edu.au] Brin and Page write:

We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence.

In their Webmaster Info [google.com] Google writes:

Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm.