Previosly, the keyword "ESL" was mentioned once in my ESL site's title and heading. I recently changed the title so that it's now mentioned 3 times: ESL go - free English as a second language: learning ESL + teaching ESL.
What kind of affect has this had? Not as significant an effect as I would have hoped. I seem to have moved up about 15 spots, from the mid-nineties to #80. Google has also registerd about 40 new links to my site (though my page rank is still 6) so link popularity may have also fueled the increase.
My reciprocal links page for ESL go has 4 links (all from other eslgo.com pages). and a page rank of 5. The links:
www.eslgo.com - page rank 6 (5 external, many internal links)
www.eslgo.com/sitemap.html - page rank 5 (no external, many internal links)
www.eslgo.com/tlinks.html - page rank 5 (about 50 external and a few internal links)
www.eslgo.com/slinks.html - page rank 5 (about 50 external and a few internal links)
It used to have a page rank of 4 with the same exact links (none of which have changed rank or (substantially) the number of outbound links (which increased a little bit). It seems like the page rank increased over time.
My ESL blog has a rank of 4 with these 5 links:
www.eslgo.com/ - page rank 6
www.eslgo.com/tlinks.html - page rank 5
www.esl-blog.com/ - just itself
songsforteaching.homestead.com/ LinksESLBilingualMulticultural.html - page rank 4 (5 external links) - at one point this was the only page google recognized linking to my site. ESL blog had a rank of 1 at that time.
www.literacyconnections.com/ LinksESLMulticulturalBilingual.html - page rank 4 (6 external links)
I would have guessed that ESL blog would have a better rank (due to the external links). I wonder if (supposing the links stayed exactly the same), the page rank would increase after a month or so.
I recently realized something I've been doing wrong since I started ESL go.com - English as a second language learning and teaching and that is the text of the hyperlinks. For example a link like ESLgo doesn't help for the keyword ESL. That's why a domain name like esl-go might have been better. Now I realize the problem and ask people to put ESL go in the text link. Of course other ESL sites don't want me to do better in the search engines so I get annoyed dealing with webmasters who insist on eslgo for my site's title.
Another thing I realized is that graphic links don't contain any keywords. Master of the obvious eh? On my site, I have a graphic header and drop down menus for a footer, and in the end my 250 pages of internal links don't help me out with key words at all. The header has to stay, but my footer will be redesigned to consist of keyword rich text links.
According to http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary/english/201, Lycos does consider domain names when determining search results (so other search engines may too) and if you want to make sure that words are separated, use a hyphen. That tells me that for my ESL web site, I should have all links pointing to www.esl-go.com and own www.eslgo.com (point it to www.esl-go.com) since it's the one people will remember and type into their browsers.
The Lycos guy points out that it's a small factor, but every little bit helps, no? Anyway, it's too late for ESLgo.com, but www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com is a name that tries to take advantage of this. Of course if you like my site you'd better add it to your favorites; www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com may be tough to remember...
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php