Can you tell this is a topic that I like :)
##From Simon
>>Unfortunately most of what you can do to achieve a higher "organic"
>>ranking in Google (in particualar) has a nominal effect on your page
>>rankings. You might be lucky if you can improve 2 or 3 places - which
>>if you are on page 2 or 3, is a problem!
For most of the non serously commercial phrase a few choice links in will make a huge difference.
Lets look at the #1 for "Psychology courses uk" (ignore ""). I am using google.com with no filters
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=Psychology+courses+uk
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/chpccp/
Now if we do a backlink search:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=link:http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eleeds%2Eac%2Euk%2Fchpccp%2F
We can see 62 sites listed. Please note that since the demise of AllTheWeb it is no longer possible to see all backlinks to a page as google only show pages that have a Toolbar PageRank of around 4/10.
So for this site it is the off page aspects that are causing it to be #1. They could do some optimisation on page as well, but at the moment they dont need to. Things like I mentioned before like page titles, h* tags etc.
Cheers
Richard
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