Need some advice on this specific Google ranking scenario

[Matt Ward]

I'm looking at a main keyword that only 1 site in the top 10 is targeting. I am pretty new at this, so I'm having a hard time sizing up competitors in this way.

Here's the top 6 people:

-#1 is a 6 year old, PR2 site with 306 backlinks to the page, 35,000 to the domain, but absolutely no on-page SEO for this keyword (actually, almost no on-page SEO at all, period)
-#2 is 4 years old, PR2 with 3 backlinks to the page, 2730 to domain and no on-page SEO at all
-#3 is 10 years old, PR4, 2310 backlinks (it's the main domain), does have on-page SEO but not for this keyword
-#4 is an article directory page, again with no on-page SEO and practically zero backlinks to the page
-#5 is Nextag, 5 backlinks and again, no SEO for this keyword
-#6 is an exact match domain with on-page SEO for this keyword but only 8 backlinks to the entire domain

The rest of page 1 is mostly the same as the above, none of them are targeting this specific keyword at all. Does this sound like a viable target? I'm not familiar with how much domain age and PR effect something like this. I would really appreciate some advice here.

[ann1986]

some of the sites ranking 1st page in google does not have the exact keywords in their anchor text when they do off-page seo and neither do they have the exact keywords in on-page SEO but sometimes they are ranking because the keywords they are campaigning is synonym to what they are currently ranking. That is if the competition is low for that keyword.

[Matt Ward]

Hmm... any other opinions?

[yukon]

Get the Free version of SEO SpyGlass, then check each of the top 10 website URLs in the Google search results for your keyword (without quotes).

This will give you a better idea what the exact keywords those sites are trying to rank for, plus you can check the Pagerank of each of those backlinks at the same time.

[dadamson]

As Yukon said, SEO Spyglass is a great tool for judging your competition, you can download this for free here - Download SEO SpyGlass 4.0, And Reveal Your Competitors Entire Linking Strategy

Also, the Traffic Travis keyword analysis will give you a fairly accurate rating out of 5 stars on how Easy it is to rank for a particular keyword in Google.

This is another free software and can be downloaded here - Free SEO Software Download | Traffic Travis

As the pages you are competing against seem like mini authorities, you will need to focus on checking the anchor-text they are using in their backlinks. - As Anne1986 suggested, they may be ranking for your keyword because of a synonym that Google has recognized as being related to your keyword.

This indicates that the results ranking for this keyword are all ranking extremely NATURALLY! - This suggests to me that a more 'natural' linking strategy is needed. (If you see that other pages that are ranking on pages 2-5 have more backlinks that are targeted heavily towards the keyword it will solidify this theory.

I would copy the linking strategies that the top 10 sites are using, keeping a natural approach but focusing a little more towards your keyword, build more links than them and watch your rankings rise. You should get there in no time.

Good luck!

-Dave