Hello,

While doing the keyword research for my website, I was looking for the sites that rank the highest in google , so I could figure out how they implement and use the keywords for the organic search results.
To my surprise, what I noticed was that keywords / keyphrases dont appear even once in the content.
As an example, this is what I used as the search phrase :
"business web design" in google.co.in (I am located in India) and looked at the content and even the source code of the sites that rank the topmost. But couldn't find the key words except may be in the meta keyword section in few sites.
I am new to the SEO, Have gone through lot of posts , lot of articles on SEO, and when I set out to do the analysis (keyword and other SEO implementation strategies) , I felt stuck, can't proceed with the SEO for my site unless this is ironed out for me.

Besides the point, I believe this defeats the purpose of search engine. A
person looking for business web design , e.g. , is not shown the appropriate results, or am I missing something here.
Thanks,
Randhir.

Were the results "appropriate" for your search? Because they look perfectly ok for the results I just got.

few were ok , and few weren't.
I have the habit of using quotes while i type the keywords in google search.

Using quotes when searching forces a "phrase match" where all the words have to match in the same order, so you not allowing the SE to find what their system has determined to be the best match.

Using quoted phrases is useful for word research purposes, but not so good if you are looking for the best results (according to the SE)

I am not sure if I understand your qeustion. Maybe it´s possible you have linked with other site with this anchor text so your site is in Serp...

After doing some research on SEO, I thought the page content needs to have the targeted keywords necessarily, but i saw many sites that rank high in google SERP's but have the same keywords just once in meta tags or do not have them at all.
Rephrasing my question :
Is it necessary to have the targeted keywords in the content, if not , then how does google get the sites with no/few keywords to the top. ?
this question is related to the On-page SEO.

Thanks.

backlink anchor text also plays a part in the ranking algo.

Having the phrase on the page is of course an important part, but if you you want to "rank" for a single phrase then you can go the very hard work route of "link bombing".
Then of course, when you get the magical ranking for the magical phrase and you find that it brings no conversions at all you are pretty much SOL.

I agree that the results of keywords with quotes differ from the one that doesn't. Maybe it has something to do with how the keyword was being pointed to as anchor text.

Internal link Anchor text is very important as well, if you make good internal link, ranking improves too.

Maybe your link anchor word about this site is that keyword.

Yes i have also seen this, when searching for a sentence in google, all the top search results have no similar texting. Just same words but in different parts of the page.

also do the regular updates in your site which help you to get fast SERP position.

Probably they have a lot of inbound links with those keywords. They should have worked hard on link building.

Originally Posted by Monicakidman

also do the regular updates in your site which help you to get fast SERP position.

Wrong!

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Wrong!

Agree reguler updating doesnt give good in SERP.. but will increase crawling rate.. this is good for SEO.. indirectly helping on SERP... Some time I got some boost in SERp after i update site( after update the chages bu G)... may be m wrong

i agree with you. i can found may of their example like you have faced. but one things i noticed that they have using ALT tag for image and target their major key words with that.

Thanks for all your answers.
So you are saying off page SEO is as important as on-page SEO - I am refering to what Chris said earlier about link bombing.

Apart from the alt text for images, there are lot of other factors to be considered such as placement of keywords, keywords in the title of the page, in the meta tags, using headers (H1 tags) with the keywords, and host of other on-page factors.

With all these answers here, I am still wondering about the google search algorithm, I think off-page factors are given more importance than on-page, as i noticed most of the sites having top placement in the organic results have quite a good link popularity VS the good content. So my original question remains.
I think i must post this on a forum that talks more about the search algorithm and google bot. Anyone knows which site/forum ?

Thanks.

So you are saying off page SEO is as important as on-page SEO

Bingo. Offpage is just as important. Whether it is anchor text, title tags, or even just content surrounding the links to the site. They all hint to google what your page is about, and which terms your page should rank for. Also age of the site is key. My bet would be those results you found are all established websites that did a good amount of link building since they began.