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Placing the keyword in certain spots within your code will have very little if any weight into a site's ranking. You should provide us with the links to give a better answer as to why they may rank higher

For a generic page you should do keyword research and make your content focus around that. But write it naturally and do not stuff the keywords in there just because you can.

For your articles. make the title tag the name of your article. That is after all the title of the document. Those top ten lists and fun articles are great things to send out and do some link building with. If done properly you can obtain some good social awareness and links.

Using a local number on the places profile will help improve its local rankings.

You should have as many as you need. Do not create categories if there are no articles you can place within them. But do not group unrelated articles under the same category. Check into some keyword research to see if your broader categories get search volume and go from there.

For the example you gave, I would say to keep them all under a "branding" category and expand into those other keywords through articles.

If you have a more broad category it may get linked to more since it has more articles people may want. Therefore increasing its PA and ranks

I am looking at 3 sites and what they have going for them and why they are ranking how they are. I would like to get some of your feedback on why certain sites are above other ones.

One of these sites is a client of mine, I will not point out which one. The other 2 are just competitors.

http://www.cornhole-game.org/cornhole-bags.html

http://www.samscornholebags.com/

http://www.ajjcornhole.com/cornhole-bags.php

I have compared them in OSE and they have PA of 39, 29, and 58 respectively. AJJ has a ton of links, many of which are spammy and irrelevant. It looks like a link package was bought at some point. The other two have a similar number of links but www.cornhole-game.org/cornhole-bags.html has more anchor text themed links. None of which seem to be overly optimized. http://www.samscornholebags.com/ seems to have a lot of company branded anchor text links compared to keyword links. http://www.ajjcornhole.com/cornhole-bags.php as I said obviously bought links and has a ton of stuffed keyword links on poor sites

http://www.ajjcornhole.com/cornhole-bags.php has minimal social shares

http://www.cornhole-game.org/cornhole-bags.html  has about 30 shares

http://www.samscornholebags.com/ has about 30 shares but a good number of likes and some other social signals.

All 3 sites have an A grade using the on page grade tool here on this site. All 3 got dinged for keyword stuffing.

http://www.samscornholebags.com/   ranks the highest with the least amount of links and PA

http://www.ajjcornhole.com/cornhole-bags.php  ranks next with a really poor link profile and the least amount of social activity

http://www.cornhole-game.org/cornhole-bags.html  ranks the lowest with anchor text links that are not spammed and some social activity

So with all of this in mind, would anybody care to weigh in on why they think any of these sites are ranking where they are in comparison to one another.