I'm new to keyword research and SEO, so forgive me if I some parts don't make sense. My question is, can someone help me understand how to rank in multiple keywords? I noticed that the more successful sites, when you choose a specific page, and enter the URL in google keyword tool or ahref keyword tool, you get a lot of keywords where that 1 page ranks in, usually between 400 to 800 in google adwords tool. But if you do the same for a less successful one, you only get a few, sometimes even in the single digits. My questions are: 1. what do the resulting related keywords that come up in google's kw tool mean exactly? 2. how do some of them get ranked in many different related keywords? And more importantly, how does one go about doing it. Ex. SERP rank 1 in kw 1, then ranked 3 in a related kw, and ranked 2 in another related kw phrase. Thanks.
The biggest factor is backlinks pointing to your page and how they relate to those keywords. If you can get a strong enough link profile using your target keywords as link anchor text, you will usually rank well for those keywords. Also you can optimize on page factors to reinforce relevance for those keywords. The stronger your link profile, the easier it becomes to rank well for multiple keywords. It does help a lot if those multiple keywords have overlapping words. As for the words that show up in google's keyword tool, those are just words that they have determined are somehow related, whether they are synonyms or just have some of the same words included. That is just to help you think of more keywords to target.
Sometimes a higher ranking site will do really well with long tail keywords, it seems that the older a site, the higher it ranks.