How to get on top of Google - A SEO case study

While searching for lyrics of Enya's Only time (which has now become one of my favorite songs and I listen to it all the time!) I stumbled to this site lyrics007. Now they seems to be huge with alexa rank of 1400 something and I can bet all the traffic it is getting is from Search engines only. I feels Lyrics007 is an excellent case study to teach someone how to do search engine optimization for the websites which are in overcrowded niche and get them on Top.

While Searching I landed on this page, so lets dissect this page from SEO point of view -

1. The very first thing that you will notice about the site is how simple the design is. No fancy columns or CSS. One excellent thing they have done is to put the Title of the page at the top - "Enya - Only Time Lyrics" in white. This is a important thing as when search engine starts reading the page, that's the first phrase they read. People feels by keeping your keyphrases at the top, it gives you brownie points in the eyes of search engines (I am not very convinced though that it has huge role to play)

2. Title is simple and again contains same key phrase - "Enya - Only Time Lyrics". I have always felt that if you are targeting only one key phrase than its always good to keep the title short and to the point. There is NO point in adding "a", "the" and such words.

3. The URL of the page will also get 100% SEO score. They have made the perfect url from the keyphrase. Though there are "%20" in url which may look ugly to normal eyes but to search engines, they just mean spaces which are perfectly alright. Though they could had used hash or underscores as well. Site is also using perfect meta keywords even though they are not pretty much ignored by search engines.

4. The site also has excellent ad placement. They have put 336x280 right there in the upper middle portion of the page and whoever comes to the page from search engines. he will see the ads first and being the first timer, there are the best chances of him clicking on them. There are also side image ads but I don't think they get too much clicks as compared to the central one.

These were the basic SEO stuff of the site - Now lets see the "tweaks" they are using for the site.

5. Just after ads, they are using a phrase "Something you should know about Only Time Lyrics" which is totally irrelevant to the human eye but for search engines it is another indication that they page is about "enya only time lyrics" which will eventually boost its ranking in serps. People may call this keyword stuffing but it is just smart SEO.

6. Than again there is Title with keyphrase name. Than again in Artists name, there is Enya's name and than again a fairly useless phrase "Visitors: 85237 visitors have hited Only Time Lyrics since Feb 12, 2007." But they are using the keyphrase again here too. So in short the page is full of keyphrase and this is where the site scores over others. In terms of lyrics, everyone has same lyrics so how should the page gets higher rank in search engines ? simple, with all the seo(even dodgy too) practices in the world.

7. This is not all, there are still few more to go. At the bottom they have given all the related links to enya, again increasing the keyword density for enya.

8. The last one is the Best and Killer one (hence probably in the last). They have used "May be you are looking for " technique and also trying to get traffic for other possible key phrases like "Enya - Only Time Lyrics for mp3" and "Enya - Only Time Lyric". So there are good chances that this page will also rank high for such phrases.

9. In the end they have provided some lousy Tips section which is just to give guidance to google adsense telling the page is about music, mp3 and audio clips.

So overall a very smart way of tuning your page to get it on top of Google. There are tons of websites which are using same database of 100,000 lyrics for $50 (check it on ebay) but they managed to get on top of it with smart SEO. If you also in similar type of field and not getting good serps rankings than I think it is good time to again reconsider your page design.