Would someone PLEASE lay out the bottom line of keyword research -- competing sites vs. page rank?
- SEO |
Of particular interest to me is keyword research and how it pertains to article marketing for the purpose of promoting affiliate products.
Although conventional advice suggests that an IMer should find long tail keywords and then search said keyword in quotes to get the number of competing sites and hope that that number is low, I've heard others say that the number of sites returned for a given keyword isn't relevant at all-- only the PageRank of the sites on the first page of search engine results for that keyword are really an issue. If your pagerank is higher than that of the sites returned for that keyphrase, you're golden.
I can understand the logic of the latter method. I decided to try to change my keyword research approach to incorporate it. Then it got confusing.
Some time ago, I published an article on EzineArticles targeting a particular keyphrase. With or without quotes, my article is the first thing returned by Google for that phrase.
http://www.prchecker.info ranks EzineArticles a 6/10. It ranks my article's URL a 0/10. The page listed for spots below my article in Google ranks an 8/10.
I'm now entirely confused. If PageRank is a reliable way to do keyword research, why am I placing higher for this phrase in Google than a site that outranks me?
Is there ANY benefit to evaluating the number of sites returned by an "exact phrase" search?
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