[Manish Pandey]

Originally Posted by bobmutch

Er your site does rank in the top 500 for "Information Web Directory".

#232
http://www.google.com/search?num=100...+Web+Directory

Also John I think that is a valid way to measure how well a page rankings by taking the title or part of the title.

Now common sense tells us you don't take one word and see how a site ranks for it but I think taking your title "Information - Avivia Web Directory" and removing the Aviva out of it and seeing how you rank is very fair.

Look at Rands site title.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization | Read SEOmoz, Rank Better

Here is how he rankings:

SEO #25
Search Engine Optimization #19
Read SEOmoz #1
Rank Better #1

The title tag is one of the optimization items that Search Engines give the most weight to. In Rands survey of 37 SEO experts the title tag was ranked the highest with a rating for 4.9 out of 5.
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#f3

Seeing how a site rankings for their title tags tells you a lot about the authority a site has -- if the title tag is completive.

Also that doesn't mean looking to see the number of results as blue and pink dogs has a page results of 2.9 million.
http://www.google.com/search?q=blue+and+pink+dogs

But put the title into quotes and you will see there only 9 pages.
http://www.google.com/search?q="blue+and+pink+dogs"

Putting a key phrase in quotes or searching using the allintitle:keyword will show give you a better idea how competitive the key phrase is.

For example title optimization has the following results
61 million no quotes
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=title+optimization
40k in quotes
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...+optimization"

And blog titles has the following results
47 million no quotes
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=blog+titles
110k in quotes
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="blog+titles"

My blog http://seo.seocompany.ca/ rankings on the first page for both these terms just based on on-page optimization.

That tells you my blog has good authority.

I think this was Rands point. To show that not very many directories have high ranking authority by showing that they don't rank well for competitive phrases they have in their title tags.

So while it smarts to have him name your site out on his point making, it is a valid point in my opinion.

While I think this is a valid point it is not my experience that having high ranking authority is needed to give value to inbound links from a site. ~40% to 60% of my $415k income last year was from link building with directories so I can say that I have experience in this area. I find that getting links from directories are not only "Google blessed" links but they are the best bang for the buck links out there.

Directories that give multiple deep links where you can put the key phrase you are targeting with out having to add your domain or company name in the anchor text works the best.

Your Aviva Directory is one of the directories I put my clients in and while it may or may not have high ranking authority and its categories pages may or may not rank high for the title tag phrase -- it still provides value for the price.

So what I would do is look at category titles on your directory and see how they rank. Best to look for 2 or 3 word phrases that have 30k plus results when they are in quotes. This will tell you a lot about the authority your directory has.

The following will help you to rank better for your titles.

1. Put only the key phrase you are targeting in your title tag only.
2. Put the same key phrase in the URL, meta description/keywords, h1/h2 tags, bold in the first paragraph.
3. Do internal linking to the page with the same key phrase in the anchor text.

Hey ya bob!

Well to what you referred above is that if a website has an authority it must rank for atleast for the title term!

Well just going a step further doing a search for allintitle:information web directory there were 79K results and doing a search for allinanchor:information web directory it had 321K sites! Now you could see with that many sites competing for the term "information web directory" (well i guess everybody knows what allinanchor shows, it shows the sites that uses that term in the anchor) it wouldn't normally mean that you would rank to the top!! Or would you?? If Aviva had those terms in there anchor text then definitely they would have outranked any website. Now, as we go to the next step Aviva uses the term "Aviva Web Directory" or "Aviva Directory", as anchor mostly! And you would see them number 1, thats for sure!

Now, coming back to you with the SEOMoz site...they are good source of information but there has been some issues lately about them giving wrong information as found by Mike. Well they have the term SEO in the title but they also have the keyword in there anchor text links! Which is the most most important factor in SEO, and well everybody knows that. They are on page three for the term allinanchor:seo for the term allinanchor:search engine optimization they are on page 9 for the term allinanchor:read seomoz they are #1 and for the term allinanchor:rank better they are again #1. So does this makes sense. The more the anchor text you get from quality related sites the better you rank!

One could not judge the search engine rankings of any website merely with their titles.

You could rank for certain terms that are not even in your title coolest guy on planet its totally the power of anchor text links, that brad uses to out rank all his competitors who are using the key words in their titles!

I guess what rand did was just a small test and he didn't go in to the details of it otherwise a SEO of his class might have done the above things up hand!