Ranking for highly Competitive keywords, Is that so important?

Raking for highly competitive keywords, Is that so important?  Or are there other things that can help a website stay on top?

This post explores some important factors and it is in continuation with my earlier post : Search Engine algorithms, Can we make them our friends?  

Lets take up wine.com. Wine.com appears in the search results of all the three major search engines ( on searching with the keyphrase “best wines”)

To find out why wine.con enjoys good rankings in all the major search engines, I did a basic check for wine.com on the below mentioned factors:

1. Domain details –
Record expires on 24-Oct-2015  
Record created on 13-Jun-1994 

The domain is a very old domain and is renewed till 2015 and therefore has a certain amount of trust with the search engines.

2.Domain relevancy – The domain name “wine.com” is very relevant to the search term and to what the web site is all about

3.Data collected from Alexa

a)Traffic rank for wine.com- 28,610
b)Sites linking to wine.com – 1052
c)Avg load time- 1.49 seconds,  53% of sites are slower

In addition to these data there are some very good reviews on wine.com in Alexa.
4. Data collected from Compete–

Unique visitors for wine.com -168,327
5. Google Page Rank for wine.com– is 6, which is pretty good

These factors are a good indicator about the general health of a website with reference to ranking in search engines.  Overall wine.com is a one stop shop for anything wine, not only does it help visitors choose wines for any occasions, one can select the wine of their choice and buy it online. The website is very well designed, easy to navigate and has a lot of excellent pictures to help the visitors decide on which wine to buy. It is understandable why wine.com enjoys good rankings in all the search engines. 

My search query was “best wines”, wine.com ranked 2nd in Google, the site which is ranking no 1 in google is bestswines.com for that search term. Why does wine.com not rank no 1 for “best wines” in spite of doing so well as far as some relevant factors are concerend.My best guess is “best wines” is not wine.com’s target keyword, wine.com ranks no 1 for “buy wine”, “gift wine” which are quite competitive too. A lot depends on the anchor texts of the sites linking to a site, a site’s unique content…. among other things…

At the end of the day what is important is visitors. Your site might not be ranking on the top for the most competitive keywords, but it might be ranking well for other less competitive ones. In my opinion, as long as you get a steady flow of visitors who are satisfied with what your site is offering, you are doing good.

I look forward to your opinion on this.