It's Wednesday, and you know what that means. It's time for another weekly Internet Business Fortune Cookie.

If you Google for “Chinese Food Restaurant” in my town (without the quotes), Pei Wei Asian diner is at the top of the list. So, I ate there this week. Pei Wei makes what I call “Americanized” Chinese food. Actually, they have Chinese, Korean, Thai, Japanese and other Asian influences present in their menu. It's not really authentic, but the quality is good.

I had their Lemon Pepper Chicken — extra spicy — and brown rice. It was pretty good. The fortune was good too.

“Life Always Gets Harder Near The Summit”

I have been trying (although not all that hard yet) to get a first position ranking in Google for “article directory list” (without the quotes) for my article directory list page. (Feel free to help me by linking to that page with the text “article directory list”).

This is not a “perfect SEO situation” because I am targeting multiple phrases with that page.  However, it was easy to get to the 11th spot (first listing on page 2), and I am currently somewhere in the middle of page one as of this writing.

So, what will it take to get to position one on page one?  Check out this analysis from Market Samurai for my keyword phrase (you can click on the image to get a better view):

As you can see, Market Samurai is showing the top ten pages for the target keyword, and where they are showing SEO strengths.  Red is hard to attack (page is doing a good job) and green is easy to attack.  You can see that my page in the fourth position (varies from day to day) has one red item — DA (latenightim.com has been around for a while).  I have 305 backlinks to my page and 7490 to my domain, and that is pretty good — yellow.  You can see that the competition that is ranking above me has many more domain backlinks and good domain age.

What is a little frustrating is that my page tags are pretty well optimized (yellow) for the keywords that I am targeting, but a couple of sites above me are not optimized at all for “article directory list”.

The bottom line is, sometimes it is hard to get to the top position for a keyword in Google, and sometimes it is even harder to understand why.

As the cookie says, Life Always Gets Harder Near The Summit.

Have a great day.
Mark

Photo credit: Uploaded on July 17, 2006 by headcase