There’s a lot of junk out there about ranking high in google and how what you have on your page isn’t as important as how many links you have pointing to you. Recently I’ve read a lot of garbage about how the only thing that matters is how many links to you. Well, here’s a little study that flys in the face of all of that.
On http://www.utahrealestatehelp.com, last week I did a little analysis and comparison of my page vs the top 10 google results for the keywords “utah real estate”. I used a tool from http://www.gorank.com (I think) that calculated keyword densities of the search terms in all kinds of important places on the page.
At the time I did this, we were showing up at about # 38 in googles results. Then I changed a bunch of stuff on the homepage. Took the words “utah real estate” out of the page about 4 times. Within 2 days, we were down on the seventh, eighth, or ninth page of the results. One of the guys I’m working with on the site saw this and im’d me flipping out: “THE SHIP IS SINKING!!!!…WHAT’S GOING ON????” It was pretty funny.
Then I put some of those words back into the page, and changed some other things like the title of the page and the meta tags (keywords and description). I put the words utah real estate back into the page more than before. Today when I checked the results, we’re now on the third page of the results, somewhere around 25-29.
If someone tells you that onpage optimization and content doesn’t matter that much, they’re either lying, stupid, or ignorant. They obviously haven’t done any testing themselves and are only repeating what other people have said, which in my opinion, there’s too much of that in the seo world.