Does anybody know what determines a websites keyword position? For instance my pr went from a 2 to a 3 today so I thought "hmmm, maybe my site will be higher in google for particular keywords" Although I did notice it had for a few words but I don't think PR has anything to do with keyword positions or does it? I think age of a domain plays the biggest part and of course good SEO, but what does everyone else think?
Keyword position in Google is known as SERP i.e. Search Engine Results Page. The position you get is only slightly infuenced by your pagerank. More importantly these factors give you better SERP: 1- Links with your keyword anchor text especially from related sites. 2- Good On Page SEO- Meta's, keyword density, description, titles, URL name, etc. 3- Original content with fairly frequent updates to your site. These are probably the top 3 and I hope this helps.
You'll see some sites with zero PR ranking number 1 and others with significant PR struggling to compete for the same keyword. There is a correlation between PR and rankings but it is not a strong correlation. Keywords in backlinks, tags and content are the major determinants in rankings.
The biggest factor in my opinion is quality back links with good anchor text. The toolbar PR doesn't affect rankings.