Keyword Research

I second what Dennis said about the 200 factors though I would add that of those 200 there are only a relative few that really, really count when going up against competitors in relatively uncompetitive niches.

It's when you come up against competitors in very high competitive niches that the remaining factors come into play.

In other words Google has to present something to searchers right? So in relatively uncompetitive niches they will not be sticklers for a site having all those 200 factors perfect before they rank them. Simply because most of the competitors in that uncompetitive niche don't have all their 200 perfect either.

A bit more below your further comments...

I may be a tad bit more experienced than you in some things from the sounds of it but bear in mind that I am a relative newbie at this stuff myself so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Having said that I would add this...ranking is NOT purely a matter of PR or backlinks. PR has very little of anything to do with ranking on a SERP page. Quite frankly I don't know why Google keeps showing PR on their Toolbar. Probably because if they dropped it a lot of people would uninstall their Toolbar but that's just speculation on my part.

But it's clear that Google has de-emphesized PR as a ranking factor in recent years to the point where it does not seem to take the PR of a site into account at all.

Some people say that backlinks from high PR sites are key but I have read convincing arguments from very experienced and very successful marketers that what is more important is relevant backlinks. Whether they come from high PR sites or not.

What I mean to say is that a backlink from a high PR, non-relevant site, means dittly squat for ranking value in my understanding. Though a lot of internet marketers might disagree with that. I've seen convincing proof otherwise.

If a site does not have the target keyword phrase in their title or scattered about in a seeming haphazard way they might be a good target to try and outrank but there are also other factors to consider. While the PR of a site doesn't matter directly for ranking purposes it DOES matter with respect to how difficult a site will be to outrank since PR is indicative of the authority that such a site has in Google's eyes.

So for example if you see a PR 5 or higher site in the SERP's that site is probably going to be impractical for you to try and outrank. I personally don't try and outrank any sites that are over PR 3 myself. I especially like it when sites have PR0's, and 1's, and perhaps 2's with less than 50 backlinks of any kind.

If they don't have a relevant title/description/URL and their backlinks are either non-existant and/or not relevant (i.e. having keyword relevant anchor text from pages that are related to the theme or topic being targeted) then yeah...there's a possibility of that niche being a good one overall.

Just be aware that a page may have all that but be encased in a domain that has very, very high authority. Like Wikipedia, Amazon, or otherwise. Google does take into account in my understanding the authority of the domain as well as given page within that domain.

Not definitively so but it does take that into account.

I personally would not spend a whole lot of time if any trying to get articles to rank with backlinks. Why bother? I prefer to try and get my own site pages to rank highly. I'm not into giving places like ezine too much of my valuable work or effort for free.

My own experience tells me that Google is not giving full link juice for articles at places like ezine anymore. I've been told as much at Google's own Webmaster forum and that makes sense to me. I mean Google is not entirely dumb. They realize that every marketer and their neighbor is trying to obtain quick backlinks through places like ezine so why would they make it easy to manipulate their SERP's and give such backlinks full weight? I don't think they do though I am sure many marketers here might disagree with me on that.

I would suggest diversifying your backlinks without relying too much on places like ezine. Forum signature links, RSS feeds to your site pages, in content guest blog postings, you name it. A little of it all spread out over time and done manually in my opinion.

Again take what I say with a grain of salt but that's what I would do.

Focus on becoming an expert keyword researcher and the rest should fall into place in time. Study the top ten in different niches and try to develop a feel for why they seem to rank well.

In the end it's all guessing. I mean we can't tell with absolute certainty how to rank at the top in Google. But we can certainly improve our guessing to the point where we hit it big once in a while.

By the way when I said sites above I should have said site pages since Google doesn't rank sites...just pages within sites.

Carlos