If you've used WebPosition's Page Critic feature, or have read past newsletters, you probably know that much of what determines a page's ranking are the statistics of the page like keyword frequency, weight, prominence, and word count. That's because most engines will read the content of a page and score it based largely on where keywords are located and how many there are in each area of the page.

Obviously counting the number of keywords in each area of the page (title, body, headings, meta tags, etc.) would be a time-consuming and tedious task. That's why we developed the Page Critic feature introduced in WebPosition Gold last March. It will provide you with plain-English, custom-tailored advice on what changes you should make to your Web page so that it will rank higher than others. More importantly, it will reveal and explain all of the statistics for your Web page such as total keyword frequency, weight, and prominence.

Webmasters who see the Page Critic report are often amazed by the wealth of information it offers into the make up of their page versus their competitor's pages. They use the powerful "Compare To Page" feature to compare their page to their competitor who already ranks at the top. They see the statistics broken out and may notice that they have just 3 keywords in the body area while their competitor has 4 keywords. No problem you say, I'll just put in 5 keywords and do them one better. Not so fast!

The search engines are smarter than that. Long gone are the days where whoever has the most keywords wins. The search engines now look for a careful balance of keywords in various areas in specific quantities.

So what are these magic formulas? Well, one way to determine that is by looking at the statistics of pages that already rank well for your chosen keyword or phrase and then try to emulate them. I'm NOT suggesting you should copy a top-ranking page since that would be a definite copyright violation. Instead, I'm suggesting you try to emulate the statistical elements of a higher-ranking page.

This is where people often fall down. In their zeal to beat their competitor, they add more keywords than their competition's page thinking a higher frequency or higher weight will mean a higher score. This is not necessarily true!

Your goal is to MATCH their statistics in the hope that you'll reach the same magic formula they did, and either bump them out of the number one spot, or grab the number two spot. If you just get anywhere in the top 10, you've won!

So what are these magic formulas I speak of? Unlike any other product on the market, the Page Critic will give you plain-English advice based on statistical averages derived from literally thousands of searches and top 10-page analysis's that we do each month. We use an adapted version of the Page Critic created by our development team to efficiently analyze thousands of pages per month.

Still, sometimes these statistical averages can be too broad to achieve top rankings on ultra-competitive keywords. That's where the Compare to Page or the Compare to the Top X Page features comes in. The Critic lets you compare your page against any number of other top ranking pages quickly and easily for your specific keyword. This gives Page Critic users a tremendous advantage over their competitors, so long as you remember that you should try to EMULATE the top ranking pages first.

If that should fail and all the advice offered by the Critic should fail, then and only then, should you experiment with throwing in MORE keywords to improve your ranking. Follow this advice and you'll save yourself a lot of frustration later wondering why you didn't achieve the rank you expected by adding more keywords.

A last bit of advice in using the Page Critic: Optimize multiple pages for various keywords. Since the search engines never publish their ranking algorithms, Web positioning will never be an exact science. However, when you use the right tools, you can improve your odds considerably. The trick to winning is to not put all your eggs in one basket. Optimize a variety of pages for a variety of engines. Submit them, then sit back and see how you do. Learn from where you did well, and where you did not, then re-optimize and create more pages to fill gaps in your ranking strategy.

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