I have a website on page 3. I have looked at some of the sites on page 1 and I should outrank them based on backlinks and content. The only thing I can think of which makes them more appealing to Google is the length of time the site has been on the Internet. My site less than 1 year - their site about 10 years.
Age in itself will not have a huge effect on ranking. Google says they use over 200 metrics to rank search results, so there could be many factors involved.
The video comes direct from Google; the PDF comes from a third-party site. I would need to see confirmation from Google that they have changed their policy before I believe it.
Today onpage content is even more important than external links. So take a look at your content on the pages you want to rank.
Fix the following things to start/check them:
First word in title tag is the one you want to rank for
First word in your h1 tag is the one you want to rank for
Have a decent density of the word in you body content
Have relevant images, named similar to your desired keyword.
Write a long text. 3000+ words
Use h2, h3 headlines with you keyword also
And then. Get links to your website from content relevant webpages and trustworty ones.
My own experience is that if your website is +6 month and you get better content and page structure, better links you will outrank others easily. Normally you will also need at least 6 month to create all that content and links
Having your keywords in your title and h1 is, indeed, good advice, but I’ve never seen it suggested (by Google or any other search engine) that it should be the first word. I’d have said it was more important to construct your title and headings so that they read well to humans.
Experience. I work in a SEO company where we also build niche websites. Ex. we own the website moneybanker.dk. Based on above principles we are ranked no 1. on almost all money related search queries in Denmark.
We do not have the best backlinks
We do not have on old domain. Like 2 years old only.
But we do have
Better content and better landingpages.
Better content structure and internal linkbuilding.
And we do exactly what i have written above and much more.
By decent density. I mean a word density around 2-3% in a text that is 3000+ words. We have written like 7000 words on our landingpages. We do this to be the best ressource in the matter of the subject we want to rank for. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Google want to show the most relevant and best ressource for a given query. We provide that We also help other companies do the same and works every time. Its NOT just about links anymore. Its more like 60% content 40% links