If you’re going after a top search engine ranking, we can assume that you’ve done all of the obvious things: chosen good titles, used keyword rich URLs, leveraged your header tags, included keyword rich image descriptions, and gotten lots of incoming links. You’ve probably even paid attention to the keyword density of your article body. But that’s only the beginning when it comes to content.
Getting a top search engine ranking for a competitive keyword requires all the things we listed above, but to really beat the rest of the pack you have to push every edge that you can. One of the critical pieces that’s hard to quantify is the content itself. The search engines don’t just run a keyword density analysis and call it a day. That would mean you could take an article about monkeys and paste in “Top Search Engine Ranking” at exactly the right frequency and rank well. Don’t bother trying, I can assure you that it doesn’t work very well.
The search engines consider the keyword phrases on a page as a whole. They verify that the words they find belong with each other. Do “search engine ranking” and “monkey” belong together? They are looking to draw a deeper conclusion about what your page is actually about, and then rank your page well for words that pertain to the main topic.
Likewise, they are looking to see if words that they expect to find with your keyword are found within the page. If your page claims to be about monkeys, they may look for words like “tree”, “banana”, “zoo”, “jungle”, “scratch” or who knows what else. The point is that they are looking both at what is on your page and for what they expect to be on your page. The more content they find that matches what they expect to see for a given topic, the more your page will be considered relevant, and the more likely you will be to achieve a top search engine ranking.
The good news is that creating original, high quality content tends to make your pages match up with these criteria quite nicely. A naturally flowing article about monkeys will probably score very well against these criteria. The only time you run into major problems is when you try to cheat the rankings by artificially stuffing a page with keywords. Stick to relevant content that’s written for people to read, and that top search engine ranking you’re shooting for can be yours.