In this article I basically gave more light to the topic and try to focus on the main sense of why you might not get a better ranking for a keyword, even though you have got a higher link volume than your competitor or a better alexa ranking.
I read from a blog about how search engines tend to rank your site by the amount of quality backlinks that your site has, I will like to oppose this search engine ranking position theory, because by logic that will not be true and the fact is that content remains king all the time, how you get a quality content is how well saturated your keywords are on that niche keyword you are trying to get a listing on Google.
The search engine weighs all other external factors but the problem is not just your ranking positions but also your rankings on other Local Google search engines, e.g you are listed on top ten on Google.com and apparently ranking at number one spot on Google.com.ng for a keyword "seo packages" now the arithmetic in this is quite simple, search engines basically do this with your precise location (don't know how they do it, but am guessing it's dictated from where your getting the most traffic from) and they rank you with respect of Local keyword competition, now if you happen to win the bout and rank higher you will get more click through rates on your keyword phrase, and it will certainly affect the other local search engines you are targeting like Google.com, they will rank you higher and deem you reputable for this keyword, the more clicks you get also contribute to your ranking positions, have seen this theory work also coupled with your Google analytic performance. so yes what you must have read about top 3 positions earning more traffic from a keyword are true to an extent, search engines do dictate the rules but with respect to their users (and not you the client), what will appeal to them most, when they see results they stick to this, when they see bad results they wave it immediately part of the reasons some site rank top 4 today and next week they go top 20 and next week they return back to top 4 position and stay there for months, this is because search engines are testing what you deliver to their users and they measure it by metrics found on Google analytics and implement algorithms to see which deliver best results, Google alone has over 200 algorithm rules it uses every day to rate your site and it rates their priority above some, the major ones that some seo firms are aware off is what they utilize.
As a rule of thumb I usually make use of a formula I developed to estimate the amount of traffic a client can get from their keywords and provide an estimate web traffic visit or hit per month, I explain to them SEO is a combination of both impression and clicks all for a cent unlike a dollar from paid adverts like search engine marketing; although the regular PPC sends you a lot of impressions and clicks it's conversion quality with SEO is not the same, rule of thumb states that top 5 websites enjoy 80% of traffic a keyword phrase generates with the top 3 earning 70% of this 80% traffic, 25% 1st position, 20% 2nd position and 15% 3rd position while 10% goes for paid advertisers (top and side ads, little conversion from ads below page).
To them this simple statement helps strengthen their expectations and also help to define my job metrics, alienating any future arguments on job delivery, Now you may ask how I arrive to this conclusions of arithmetic’s, well you can do the math and check your web traffic for all keywords your site is ranking and check the monthly total traffic and use this rule to deduce why you have a 800 monthly traffic visit or a 120000 monthly traffic visit (make sure you check only the organic search traffic from your search engine traffic or Google/referral) and make sure that you checked the target region volume of search,e.g. the volume of search for “web marketing” on google.com only is 16000 from Google keyword tool, but that is an estimate of 6 months, now per month it varies so you might think that the search volume is 16000 it may fall next month and you get 12000. Using Google trend helps you to predict the next volume and using my formula will help you to estimate your traffic for that keyword with respect to your ranking position.
Please note that the search volume for web marketing is fictional you should check yours using the Google keyword tool, I use this figure because the search volumes are not constant.


I am a seo specialist and own a seo optimization company and I have over 7 years of self knowledge in this field before jumping and was able to demonstrate my results. I hope have been able to shed more light to the topic and how search engines like Google behaves with ranking your site. Thanks and happy internet marketing!