What Counts the Most?

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We have seen that what you place in the title bar counts for a lot. There are two common approaches to the title bar.

1) Put two keywords (or keyword phrase) separated by a pipe symbol, eg | , plus the business name, or

2) Your category of business, plus business name, plus keyword.

But lets assume the first 10 in the SERP all follow item one above. What then? How will google differentiate between them? By content? By backlinks? or the other hundreds of parameters?

Everyone knows, or should know by now what are the most important factors, especially if you are in that select group that wants to be ranked on the first page. Just doing a few things correctly that your competitors dont do, can make all the difference in the world. Of course, if you have 10 times better content, or ten times better backlinks, the little things may not matter much. This is because not all parameters are equally weighted.

One of the little things that can make a difference, for example, is the organization of your content. I call this, the power of the pyramid. This is where less common keyword phrases are used to support more common keywords. The building blocks of the pyramid. There are three common errors when creating content.

1. Building content for highly competitive keywords, without using less competitive keywords in a supporting role, or the opposite,
2. Creating content for long tail keywords, and ignoring the highly competitive keywords, when you now have the supporting keywords that can make a difference, and
3. Not organizing your content in a supportive role, by using folders and files the search engines can easily drill down.

I have heard that, some highly ranked sites with lots of content don't even use the keywords in their content pages. This may work if you have lots of content, but this may not be where you are at right now, so you should always try to prioritize you activities, so you are working on the most important things first, and then work your way down your priority list.

Also, when doing tasks, it does not mean you have to finish one task before starting another. Another words, if your goal is to have a lot of good content, it doesn't mean you have to finish this task, before starting to work on backlinks. On the other hand, when doing content pages, it would be good to think through the organization of your content before you start. Having organized pages, is better then having one long list of blog pages, if what you want is to get highly ranked on multiple keywords.

By: Nick the SEO guy