How can a page be top rated for a phrase it does not have?

[BeytzNet]

Hi,

While looking to buy a Christmas gift to my wife I was searching for yellow diamonds.

Being a bit familiar with SEO I gotta understand how the following page was ranked 4th for "yellow diamonds":

http://www.bluenile.com/diamonds/fancy-color-diamonds

The phrase yellow diamonds is not mentioned even once!

Thanks

[TLM]

The best answer I have seen is from a Whiteboard Friday that Rand put out a few weeks ago.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday

Take a listen, it is interesting and if I read your question correctly, it is the answer you vare looking for -or at least a good starting point.

[BeytzNet]

Thanks but I'm not even talking about anchors and/or links from other places.

I'm talking about plain on-page texts.

The page does no have the phrase "yellow diamonds" written even once.

It's amazing

[TommyTan]

Hi,

I took a quick look at the website and actuallly did the search on Google.  Although the word "Yellow Diamond" is never mentioned in the text ,but they did use yellow "text text" diamond (such as Yellow Radiant Cut Diamond) and from what I see, Google is picking up on that.  Furthermore, I see that they also used Yellow "text text" diamond for the Image Alt Texts and Image URL  which are also factors for on-page SEO.

Furthermore the keyword yellow "text text" diamonds are mentioned a lot of times in the related items section.

I understand why you wondering why although they didn't use  "Yellow Diamond" on any on-page factors, but since you are familiar with SEO, you should know that backlinks are really important to ranking factors as well. I just used SEOmoz's research tool to check on bluenile.com's linking and saw that they have a lot of backlinks from high authority sites.  I believe that is the reason why it is ranked 4th.

Edit: I just saw the video that Tyler mentioned in his answer and it seems like it applies to this situation as well.

Hope this helps!

[BeytzNet]

Just wondering,

Are the backlinks for "yellow diamonds" or you didn't go so deep?

[vironc]

Since your question is about on-page optimization...If you look at the page source code, for this particular page you are referring to, you'll see that the words "yellow diamond" and a combination of Yellow and Diamond(s) appear several times. To be specific:

• Yellow Diamond  - Once (On meta name="<a class="attribute-value">keywords</a>" content= )

• Diamond/ Diamonds -  More than 70 times (Including on ahrefs, links, alt tags, h tags etc.)

• Yellow - More than 50 times (Including on ahrefs, links, alt tags, h tags etc.)

Add to that the fact that they might be having good references from outside pages.

So, there you go.

[TommyTan]

Hi,

Based on the OpenExplorer Tool, it seems like the sites are linking to them on the keyword "Blue Nile."

However, based on Rand's prediction on Google using Co-Citation, it seems to make sense.  It may be because other sites are mentioning Yellow Diamond by Blue Nile without linking to them and Google sees that or used Blue Nile as anchor text and linked but Google is still picking up that Yellow Diamond is associated with Blue Nile.  Therefore, it is ranked 4th.

Hopefully this solve your curiosity.  I actually learned something new as well.

[vironc]

BTW, I was curious and just now had a look at the page you are referring to, using the SEOMoz On-Page Analysis tool and it gave a "C" for the keyword "Yellow Diamonds". A "C" means the keyword appears in 70-80% of the tested elements.

So, now you can see what I've been talking about above comes into play for the exact keyword "Yellow Diamonds".

BTW, For "Diamond" it received "B" (Which is higher than "C") and for "Yellow" it received "C" again. So you can see that these combination led to the SEOMoz  On-page Analysis tool giving a "C" for the exact keyword "Yellow Diamonds"

[MarketingOfAmerica]

I have ranked 100's of keywords on sites that I wasn't allowed to touch the front page of.  The keywords were not mentioned on their pages at all either.  In some instances your keyword doesn't even need to be on the page to rank like i this instance.

Have a great day.