Is onpage SEO really this powerful?

I'm doing some KW research with TT and I've got a KW phrase I like that TT rates as "reletively easy" competition. The thing is that all the other pages have high PR, high authority, and thousands of backlinks. Most have edu BLs and one has over 100 edu BLs!

The only thing this KW has going for it is that no other pages have the exact KW phrase inurl, intitle, indesc, OR inH1. Also, none of them are DMOZ listed if that even means anything anymore.

I generally only go after KW's with top 10 pages that have few links and are generally crappy IM pages. Trying to compete with these big pages strictly because they aren't onpage optimized seems dumb, but TT say's it's "relatively easy"!

I'd appreciate any insight you all may have about how powerful onpage seo is when it comes to competing against big sites with a MNS.

Thanks,

Try going to Google and type in your keyword without brackets. Then you will see your true competition and the pages that are ranking for that term. If they're not properly optimized on page this does give you a chance but if they're high PR authority sites it will take a lot of effort to displace them!

Ignore Traffic Travis's rating. It's completely unreliable.

if on page seo is done correctly, yes you can absolutely compete if the other sites truly aren't targeting that term

On page SEO is definitely important. When doing purely white hat SEO, it's important to do everything in your power to create content that is absolutely relevant to the keywords.

Now to answer your question: I doubt you can easily(if at all) displace high PR sites, even if they don't have any direct matching KWs, with just on-page optimization. . . that is, unless your site already has high PR and is considered somewhat of an authority with similar keywords.

Either way off page seo is a large part but on page is important, if not as important as off page seo.

subpop138 said:

The only thing this KW has going for it is that no other pages have the exact KW phrase inurl, intitle, indesc, OR inH1. Also, none of them are DMOZ listed if that even means anything anymore.

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Well, um, yeah..

Keyword: how to eat a cpu with salt

Current number #1: http://www.ageuk.org.uk

Backlinks of number #1: Over 100,000
Linking root domains of #1: over 10,000

Could I beat it for that phrase with a blogspot with 0 backlinks? Yes.

Does this prove that backlinks mean nothing? No.

Does this say anything about the power of onpage SEO? No.

Does this tell us ANYTHING useful at all? No.

i don't really much believe that OPSEO really has that power but a couple of IMers in my country claim to have very nice experience with OPSEO only

Thanks for all the input guys.

BlueTurtle said:

Well, um, yeah..

Keyword: how to eat a cpu with salt

Current number #1:

Backlinks of number #1: Over 100,000
Linking root domains of #1: over 10,000

Could I beat it for that phrase with a blogspot with 0 backlinks? Yes.

Does this prove that backlinks mean nothing? No.

Does this say anything about the power of onpage SEO? No.

Does this tell us ANYTHING useful at all? No.

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The KW phrase in question has 1000 local exact match and a CPC of $36.90. It's only three words and the 2nd two words are "car insurance" so it's not like I'm going for some crazy long tail with no searches or CPC. If the KW was "how to eat a cpu with salt" I wouldn't even be asking about it. If I thought I could rank for this KW with a bl0gsp0t I wouldn't be asking about it either lol.

This KW definitely looks like it could make good money but I've never done anything in this niche and I'm assuming the comp is very stiff even if they're not targeting the KW I am. I guess throwing up a few pages is really the only way to know for sure.

the_demon said:

Ignore Traffic Travis's rating. It's completely unreliable.

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idk about that, i find it very easy to glide past high authority non targets, with high authority targets

Onpage seo accounts for very little in terms of ranking. Do a search on google for "click here"

As you are a practising seo I would advise you to do your own tests and see for yourself what really works. Ie at the moment partial match domains seem to rank better than exact match domains.

If you want to rank for blue widgets should you use every single opportunity to add blue widget in to the page? Should blue widget be in the domain, title, h1, 5% in the body, bold, alt tag, and so on? Can google detect if that is over the top? Is there a penalty if you over optimise?

Everyone will give you there own opinions but if you truley want to know and be the best in this proffesion then you need to test, test, and test some more.

subpop138 said:

Thanks for all the input guys.

The KW phrase in question has 1000 local exact match and a CPC of $36.90. It's only three words and the 2nd two words are "car insurance" so it's not like I'm going for some crazy long tail with no searches or CPC. If the KW was "how to eat a cpu with salt" I wouldn't even be asking about it. If I thought I could rank for this KW with a bl0gsp0t I wouldn't be asking about it either lol.

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Removed. I was a bit harsh.

As far as relevance goes, I would say at least the top 50 results are all relevant. They are all about car insurance. If I have a 5 page MNS targeting ****** car insurance, does that outweigh a site with 1000 pages about car insurance, high PR, and lots of trust? I don't feel like it would, but TT says it does.

subpop138 said:

As far as relevance goes, I would say at least the top 50 results are all relevant. They are all about car insurance. If I have a 5 page MNS targeting ****** car insurance, does that outweigh a site with 1000 pages about car insurance, high PR, and lots of trust? I don't feel like it would, but TT says it does.

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It's not a 1 or 0 case. Your ranking is a factor of your relevance and strength.

Since it's X car insurance, they're not just targeting the 2nd 2 words, but they're targeting them in order.

You won't be able to beat them without any backlinks, but you won't need to match their strength to beat them for the full phrase.

Hello Mate,

off page seo is a big part ..... on page is important...Google see on page 1st.

Esolutions1 said:

Hello Mate,

off page seo is a big part ..... on page is important...Google see on page 1st.

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Um, what's with the "sig for sale" crap?

Are you trying to scam people? You must realize your sig is worth $0 since you can't post links in it.

On-site SEO (notice I say on-site not on-page, there's a difference) is great when you combine it with great links. If you do great on-site SEO and without any great links you manage to rank well, then you either found a cash cow (very unlikely) or you just wasted your time on that keyword (very likely).

You can not rank well for a decent keyword without good links. Now the question is how decent that keyword of yours is.

madoctopus said:

On-site SEO (notice I say on-site not on-page, there's a difference) is great when you combine it with great links. If you do great on-site SEO and without any great links you manage to rank well, then you either found a cash cow (very unlikely) or you just wasted your time on that keyword (very likely).

You can not rank well for a decent keyword without good links. Now the question is how decent that keyword of yours is.

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On-site and off-site are entirely different things for different aspects of SEO.

People lump SEO into 1 thing they call "strength", when really there's several things:

Relevancy: on page(all) + offsite( anchor text keyword/content of page the link is from

Strength: Number of backlinks + PR + quality of backlink(several things can be lumped in here)

Trust: Domain age + trust of sites that are linking to you.

These are really the main 3 things you should be looking at for your money page. For backlinking your backlinks trust isn't as important as just juicing the heck out of them(strength).

"authority" technically could be another factor, but IMO authority is really a combination of trust/strength/relevancy. Ie, an authority site is a strong, trusted and relevant.

If you tackle SEO and keyword research purely from the standpoint of just strength you're going to continually be very confused about the results you get. You need to understand these 3 main ranking categories to properly understand SEO.

There's 100's of individual ranking factors, but they can all generally be categorized into one of the three strength, trust and relevance.

When you understand these 3 things you'll start to understand why certain sites are ranking.

trust/strength are kind of similar in the sense that you won't find many trusted sites that aren't strong. Generally if a site has backlinks from highly trusted areas of the web then it's also going to be pretty strong since those trusted sites provide strong backlinks.

It still helps to differentiate the 2 of them when approaching your link building campaign though. To build more trust for your site you can get links from strict directories like yahoo/dmoz, authority sites or any other site that looks like it's not spammed to death.

Mainly though you'll just want to not LOWER your trust and this is why we don't blast our money sites anymore as this will get you a lot of strength, but low trust, which will in turn cause your site to drop, sandbox and/or dance.

the_demon said:

Ignore Traffic Travis's rating. It's completely unreliable.

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I agree with him that TT is not always accurate for rating your competitors. Some other tools can also be used for that purpose.