Here is a nougat of information that surprisingly I havent heard spoken of much by SEO people. The length of time that a certain keyword has been associated with a certain page is a very important factor in ranking. For example: Suppose your competitors have pages optimised for the keyword “monkey feed” and then you come along and launch a page for “Indian monkey feed”. Soon you find you rank better then them for this keyword. So your competitors follow suit and change their pages to include “Indian monkey feed” just like yours. Who ranks better? Answer: You do. You will maintain your dominance for Indian monkey feed for some time dispite your competitors having better pages. Its not about the age of the page or the domain. Its simply about who was the first to include that keyword in their page. So the moral of the story is that when you launch a page, think about all the possible secondary keywords, like “Indian” that you may also want to rank well for - espacially the ones the competition haven’t yet thought of.

Is it better to have many small pages or one large page to cover a range of keywords? This is a discussion I have had many times. In fact, inexperienced webmasters tend to dedicate a whole page to a keyword. This has advantages in that you can put the kw in the page title. But here is evidence that such flagrant over-optimising of your site in not needed and can even be damaging. You can achieve better results by having larger pages that cover a range of related keywords. The key is proximity of the secondary keywords. What do I mean by this? Look at the screenshot. The primary keyword of the page is “Kölner Karneval”, but the secondary keywords are things like “2010″. The result: the page works well for decent keywords like “Karneval 2010″. Why? Because the secondary keyword appears three times in close proximity, and is not distributed around the page. This is interpreted by Google as natural language and can be contrasted with a scattergun approach to kw distribution, which does not work. Believe me, this natural language approach does works. I have many examples and here I give you one. Have a nice day!