The "Can I Question" - (Can I get my web pages to the top on the search engine results page form my keywords?)  introduces two crucial SEO concepts

1. keyword difficulty
2. niche keywords

Interestingly, whereas there are more than seven million searches for 'SEO' each month on Google, there are only 1600 searches for 'keyword difficulty' and 3600 searches for 'niche keywords'.

It is a scientific principle to work with definitions but working definitions for these two terms could not be found. I therefore wrote an article providing working definitions in 2009.

Keyword difficulty compares the relative strength of the competition for a given keyword in comparison to the potential strength of a web page on your website.

A niche keyword is defined as having

1. an above threshold search volume
2. for the targeted locality of the website
3. with potential for top 10 positioning
4. on the search engine results page
5. for that locality or country.

A professional person such as a lawyer, teacher or electrician, might be happy with a webpage that would attract one new customer each month, whereas a large information website such as Wikipedia would not target such a small audience. A family lawyer in London would not be seeking clients from Melbourne and would therefore wish to have a webpage on top of Google.co.uk.

Those of us with an interest in SEO would keep an eye on at least a few experts to monitor developments. Howie Schwartz is one such acknowledged expert and here is a screen capture following one of his e-mails in September 2009. He shows the top web pages on Google for the keyword 'credit repair' which has 36 million competing webpages.He discusses the importance of three factors thought to be in the Google algorithm for search positioning.

The top a page has a PageRank of 7 but the webpage in position 11 has a PageRank of 0.  If this webpage can be number 11 out of 36 million then one has to question the importance of PageRank.

Over many years I have learned a great from Andre Voge and Johannes Selbach's excellent suite of programs Internet Business Promoter or IBP.

One option they provide is to analyse one of your webpages for what Andre and Johanees consider to be the most important 35 ranking factors in the Google algorithm.

The majority of their factors are on-page but they include some off-page factors such as links in globally and links from social networks. PageRank is not included in their analysis.

The IBP program analyses these 35 factors for your webpage and compares it to the top 10 webpages for your keyword on any search engine of your choice. A detailed report and recommendations are provided. Your webpage is given a score provided as a percentage of what could be achieved. A valuable weekly newsletter is provided freely by Andre and Johannes and this is a screenshot from one of them and it explains why they do not believe PageRank to be helpful. They looked at PageRank for top 10 webpages for some very popular and commercially desirable keywords. As they say, it is possible to get a top 10 ranking on Google even if your webpage has a PageRank of zero. In addition, you can see that the search results are not sorted according to PageRank. This newsletter is admittedly dated but I have found nothing on later newsletters to suggest a change of mind.