How is this site listed so high?

[metaphase]

I was just browsing looking at how people achieve high rankings for pretty good key phrases, I am intrigued by this:

<snip>

There is one mention of the phrase in meta keywords (3rd phrase in) 1 link out to a page "the-keyword-phrase.htm" and mentioned on 1 ALT description.

It is NOT in the title tag, meta description, or even mentioned on the page in natural text (as we are led to beleive that content is king and mentioning the keyword in natural text is the best thing for search engine placement??)

So what else is going on off page for this to work so well? They have a few inbound links to their homepage, but as far as I can see it doesnt mention this keyphrase in the link text?

What IS the secret?

Other factors I thought made a negative difference, they use Flash for the main menu, they use nested tables for layout (pushing down the content)

[JohnW]

The site you mention has over 14,000 backlinks. I did not look, but I bet a bunch of them have the keywords in the anchor text.

[metaphase]

How are u checking the back links? like this (624 links show up)

Is there a search you can do on google to show all the pages that DO link to their homepage with that anchor text in?

Thanks again

[Marcia]

Is there a search you can do on google to show all the pages that DO link to their homepage with that anchor text in?Google shows very little about backlinks now.

You have to check at Yahoo. This shows all the links to the homepage:

link:http://www.example.com

This shows all the links to the entire domain, including subdirectories and subdomains, if there are any.

linkdomain:example.com

At Google you can search for allinanchor:keyword phrase and see where any particular site is, relative to others. Of course, there can be variations of anchor text used - it won't necessarily all the the same, and shouldn't be.

We dont need to have the specific posted, but they have a tremendous number of backlinks, both to the homepage and interior pages as well, and that is what's giving them the ranking boost.

The site is certainly on topic and relevant for the search, but it's the link that are doing it.