I go to all these different sites like Incredible Hulk and Superman and these sites don't really focus on keywords at all. The only keywords they focus on are the subjects themselves like the keywords "Incredible Hulk" and "Superman" being used all throughout the site. The just have lots and lots of content. Is it content that will get your site to the top of Google? If you were to make a site on Superman for example or some other superhero character, will you need to just focus on having tons of content and use the word "Superman" about a few billion times throughout your site AND have tons of backlinks to your site? Is that how you get ranked high by Google? I'm just thinking that's what it takes based on what I've researched to date. There are sites that are so general and not at all focused on any specific keyword that are right at the top of Google.
Give an example URL that ranks "well" and the keyword phrase for which it ranks "well"... and I bet we can point out why. It could very well be that while the on-page SEO sucks, they get lots of links with that keyword phrase as the link text... or one of 1000 other reasons.
Ok, here we go: Put in "Hulk" in Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Local Search Volume is 2,740,000 and Global Search Volume is 9,140,000...all for the month of June. Put in "Hulk" in Google search box. 22,300,000 pages come up for "Hulk". Now if we wayside all the Hulk Movie trailers and wikipedia, we find on pages 1-3 a whole lot of Hulk pages like: -How to Feel Like the Incredible Hulk(Blog) -Incredible Hulk Diary that is on the Internet(Blog) -Hulk Opening title sequence -HulkAngry.com which I don't even know which keywords its optimized for and how it got a ranking on page 3. LOL! This could be a major learning curve if I could fully understand how Google is ranking sites and based on what. Are all of these sites optimized for the keyword "Hulk"? That keyword has 22,300,000 pages of competition. How could one even get a site within the top 3 pages for a keyword that busy?
I'll use "HulkAngry.com" since it seems to have you baffled and amused. A quick look says, "Yea! This site is NOT SEO'd well." I mean not a single page has an <h1> or <h2>. But the site DOES have a LOT going for it (not necessarily in the following order for importance). 1) The domain has been around since 7/26/2004 so it has 5 yrs of age to it. 2) The domain has the keyword "hulk" which was your search phrase in the domain itself. 3) The home page URL which is the one that ranks 27th for "hulk" has a <title> of "Incredible Hulk". So the word "hulk" has a 50% density within the <title>. 4) I counted manually about 38 occurences of the word "hulk" on the home page. According to the analysis byAaron Walls Keyword Density Tool at SEOBook.com of http://hulkangry.com, the home page has a 7.17% density for the word "hulk" and 1.35% density for the word "Marvel". According to a search for "~hulk" at Google (notice the words that are bolded in the results - hulk AND marvel), you can see that the word "marvel" is STRONGLY related to the word hulk and occurences of "marvel" on the page will help it rank for "hulk". 5) Every page on their site that is indexed has slightly different <title>s so they are targetting slightly different keywords, but ALL have the word "hulk" in the <title>. So every page on the site is relevant to "hulk". 6) Every link to another page on the site contains the word "hulk" in the link text. So there is a flow of hulk relevancy around the entir site... everything on the site is related to hulk so interlinking of the pages almost ALWAYS results in a hulk related page linking to a hulk related page. Flow of relevancy! VERY Important in ranking. But what is MOST important is probably the page and site's backlink profile. I use Yahoo! Site Explorer to check this. 1) The site has about 187 inbound links from very relevant pages to the home page. 2) The site has about 743 inbound links from very relevant pages to the entire site. So this site while having quite a number of relevant links to the home page, has MOST of their links to non-home page pages... In otherwords, lots of sites link to lots of pages on their site. This is what makes a domain an authority. Sites who have most of their links going ONLY to the home page are NOT considered by Google to be that much of an authority. Furthermore, their backlink profile is VERY strong. While they may not have 10 of thousands of links, the links they have use "Hulk" in the link text, come from relevant pages, and in most cases are relatively high PR pages. Those 3 things together make links VERY strong. For example, just going down the top 15 links to the home page listed in Yahoo! Site Explorer I see: http://superherouniverse.com/ a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulk" as the link text. It's a PR4 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://www.spiderman-web.com/ a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulk Angry" as the link text. It's a PR3 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://www.supermantv.net/superman/newmoviepics.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "The Incredible Hulk Fan Site" as the link text. It's a PR4 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://spiderman-web.com/spiderman/teamups.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulk" as the link text. It's a PR2 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://www.supermantv.net/superman/georgereeveswallpaper.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "The Incredible Hulk Fan Site" as the link text. It's a PR3 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://www.supermantv.net/supermanvshulk.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulk" as the link text (and the "Hulk" link text is even inside a <b> bold element). It's a PR3 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://spider-manposters.com/ a relevant page links to them w/ "HulkAngry.com" as the link text. It's a PR2 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://www.supermantv.net/superman/moviepics.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "The Incredible Hulk Fan Site" as the link text. It's a PR3 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://www.supermantv.net/comics/hulksuperman/ a relevant page links to them w/ "Incredible Hulk Site" as the link text. It's a PR3 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://www.supermantv.net/superman/movie_new.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "The Incredible Hulk Fan Site" as the link text. It's a PR3 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://spiderman-web.com/spiderman/wallpaper.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulk" as the link text. It's a PR2 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://superherouniverse.com/wiki/Hulk a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulkangry.com - Incredible Hulk fan site" as the link text. It's a PR2 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://superherouniverse.com/superheroes/marvel/daredevil-wallpaper.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulk" as the link text. It's a PR2 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://www.posterlovers.com/hulk.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulkangry.com" as the link text. It's a "Page not currently ranked at Google" PR page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. http://captain-america.us/wallpaper.htm a relevant page links to them w/ "Hulk" as the link text. It's a PR3 page. It IS indexed at Google so it will count as a backlink. So while the site may be cheesy looking and the on-page SEO may suck, their back link profile is incredibly strong... with every inbound link that I looked at having "hulk" in the link text (most important), being from a relevant page (2nd most important), usually from a PR2-4 site (3rd most important), are all do follow links, and being from a page that IS indexed at Google which should ensure that Google counts the link. They've done a great job of varying their link text which looks very natural while still have some links w/ exactly "Hulk" as the link text. IMO the back link profile of a page carries FAR more weight than any other thing about a page because it affects so many ranking factors... and because Google relies on it as an unbiased signal for the site (which is why they are so into handing out penalties and bans when they discover people are artificially affecting the signal by paying for links, creating link farms, etc.) It's also why I say with enough back links from relevant sites with the targeted keyword phrase or slight variations of that keyword phrase as the link text, I can make a page void of content or one that has content but never even contains the targeted keyword phrase rank for just about anything. The home page from hulkangry.com absolutely deserves to be at position 27 if not higher IMO.
They might be using paid links...which is why they are ranking high irrespective of having good keywords
Their keywords are fine... It's just a simple site, not a professionally put together site. These types of sites often attract lots of inbound links naturally. Why is it that when a site actually is doing well in the SERPs people automatically LEAP to the assumption that they are doing something shady like "paid links"? Is it because egos are such that people just can't accept the fact that what someone else is doing might actually work? This site is ranking well because they have links from other relevant sites with the keyword "hulk" somewhere in the link text. Almost every link to this site will ALWAYS have "hulk" in the name because their domain name has "hulk" in the name. So whether the other site links to them with "Hulk Angry", "hulkangry.com", or some other link text, you will get "hulk" in the link text 99% of the time. I would spend a little time researching their back link profile before you start throwing out accusations that they MIGHT be using "paid links". You MIGHT be a terrorist, but I'm not going to throw that out there unless I have proof or at least what APPEARS to be proof. Paid links get expensive, and my guess is that if the webmaster had the cash to buy enough paid links to make a difference then he/she would spend some of that cash fixing his/her site so that it looks a little more professional and has MUCH better on-page/on-site SEO.
Age of domain and number of backlinks also give good weightage to site's ranking. However, if u want to start something new (site), better start with right approach which will make your site more easier to get good rank. Try to focus on good KEI keywords. Cheers..