Coffee growing in Costa Rica (where Starbucks gets a lot of their coffee).

Yes, you can do it without even having the keyword on the page a single time or in the Title tag. Here's proof that it can be done and how you can do it too

Do a search on Google for the word, coffee and you will find that there are 357 million web pages using that word and Starbucks is showing up in the number 2 position. That's not too surprising, but the shocker is that the word coffee is not used a single time on Starbucks Home page.

How did they do it?

First, let's look at everything they did wrong!

#1. Their Title tag is "Starbucks Homepage." The word coffee is not included. This is a total waste of their Title tag. They would rank high for the word, Starbucks anyway and who is going to search for the word homepage?

#2. Taking a look at their Keyword tag (which Google doesn't even look at) shows that they included 51 keyword phrases. You can't optimize a page for 51 keyword phrases -- two to three normally with five being the absolute max. This didn't help or hurt their search engine ranking -- it just shows that their web designer didn't know what he was doing and had a big "wish list."

#3. What else did they do wrong? Their Home page is made up of almost all flash -- very, very few actual words, and Google loves words.

So what did they do right? What is their secret?

It's the power of Anchor text and Links.

Google is showing 2,780 links and we all know that Google only displays a small percentage of the links they know about.

If you look at the anchor text of a lot of their links, you will find the word coffee included (in different ways) as part of the anchor text. This is important. Google doesn't like to see the anchor text of links all being word-for-word the same. This doesn't look natural.

Of course, it's easier said than done to get a lot of links to your site and to get these links to include your most important keyword or keyword phrases is even harder, but at least this example shows the power of links and anchor text.

The frustrating part

Starbucks ranked high in spite of what they did rather than because of what they did. And the frustrating thing for use is that Starbucks probably didn't do much (if anything) to get the links to their site. People just linked to them on their own and we are not that lucky -- we have to work to get our links.

And if Starbucks had done it right . . .

Who knows, if Starbucks had followed a few of the basic search engine rules and included the word coffee in their Title tag and in the text on their Home page, they might be ranked in the #1 position instead of the #2 position.

One last point, if you look at the bottom of the Starabucks Starbucks page, you will see the word coffee, but it's in a picture. You see it, but the search engines don't see it because it's not actually text on the page.

Bottom line: Don't underestimate the power of the anchor text in links. Get enough links (with different versions of your most important keyword phrase included in the anchor text) and your site can rank high for any keyword or keyword phrases.

By the way, the picture at the top of this page is a picture of coffee growing in Costa Rica (where Starbucks gets a lot of their coffee). I made the picture last Fall when the coffee was just starting to get ripe. The red coffee bean is ripe and ready to be picked.