Choosing a random keyword phrase, I decided to play with some Google SERPs and stats therein to see if I could find any correlation. I did find something pretty interesting. Google seems to favor and rank sites based on keyword density within the URL, title, description, and keywords, and places less importance on backlink stats. If we look at weddingpaperdivas.com (ranking 1st for ‘wedding invitations’) and partypop.com (ranking 2nd for ‘wedding invitations’) we notice that partypop’s backlink numbers are significantly higher than weddingpaperdivas’ but their keyword density for ‘wedding invitations’ is less that 03%. With weddingpaperdivas’, their keyword density for ‘wedding invitations’ is just under 50%. Even though weddingpaperdivas has less backlink power, their keyword density seems to be playing a huge part in pushing them to the top of the SERPS for this particular keyword phrase.

I used the FireFox LinkChecker extension to compile some domain age and Yahoo! backlink data. I created a list of five press release outlets, 25 social bookmarking sites, and 17 social news sites. Enjoy!