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Thank you very much CMC-SD, Jared and goodlegaladvice for all your help.

@CMC-SD: As promised, I stole your analogy (Now I realize it was an analogy and not a metaphor, I think) and I tried to explain CMS to my girlfriend who knows nothing about computers. Unfortunately it did not come out as elegantly as you put it and we ended up eating bison burgers instead.

@CMS-SD: Great metaphor! I'm going to steal it But I already knew that about CMS's xD.  In fact my confusion was about what follows from that... If the pages are created dynamically and not retrieved from the webserver itself, how do would a backlink even REFER it??

I actually found this SEO blog touching on the subject matter: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

So, pretty much this is how it works: A page is linked through the URL that is randomly generated by a CMS, but the webserver rewrites the URL that points to the original URL. Pretty much the same thing. And google indexes that URL plus the html on the page. Is that about right? That is why I should not worry at all.

Ahhh, so Google indexes URLs and not the pages themselves? D'oh.

I was under the impression that URL rewrites just change the way the URL is displayed on the browser but not the URL itself. I really need to learn more about the backend stuff.

So it would make no difference if the backlink contained an absolute path?

So I need to build a website with over 100 pages in it. Elements of the design will probably be moved around and or tested so I need to use a CMS. It's pretty much a review site so while the content will remain static I'd like to employ A/B testing to mess with conversion rates. Wordpress has a plugin for that even.

So I'm just wondering, since CMS pages are pretty much created on spot and not retrieved from a library, how this affects backlinks and anchor text? How exactly does the external website point to yours if the URL is dynamically generated?

Or am I misunderstanding something? Please recommend any extra resources as well if you can.

Thank you two for the answers but I didn't realize one simple thing. The google adword tool is mainly for well....Adwords. The keywords are probably highly competitive in terms of CPC and the number of people vying for them. I was doing organic ranking research. This is why I was confused as to why the keywords were "highly competitive" but an opensite analysis of the top 10 would show that they had very little page authority or good if at all backlinks. The sites that would show up would be the manufactorers or an ebay page or something like that!

Hello guys, so I'm still wet behind the ears and am currently reading SEO an Hour a Day, as well as going through the Moz tutorial. But I do have a question that's been confusing me a bit.

I've been doing keyword research here and there and I will get a "Highly Competitive" keyword (61%) at times. So then I try to go through each of the top 10 pages to see the anchors that they've used and how many backlinks there are to that page.

A lot of the times the page with have 0 backlinks and a very low page authority (like 1) but it will still rank in 2, or 3. So what exactly makes it competitive? I know I must be missing something super simple here! Maybe I'm not accurately assessing the anchor/backlinks to that specific keyword.

I use backlinkwatch, opensite explorer and the keyword difficulty report.

Thanks guys!

Thank you very much CMC-SD, Jared and goodlegaladvice for all your help.

@CMC-SD: As promised, I stole your analogy (Now I realize it was an analogy and not a metaphor, I think) and I tried to explain CMS to my girlfriend who knows nothing about computers. Unfortunately it did not come out as elegantly as you put it and we ended up eating bison burgers instead.

@CMS-SD: Great metaphor! I'm going to steal it But I already knew that about CMS's xD.  In fact my confusion was about what follows from that... If the pages are created dynamically and not retrieved from the webserver itself, how do would a backlink even REFER it??

I actually found this SEO blog touching on the subject matter: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

So, pretty much this is how it works: A page is linked through the URL that is randomly generated by a CMS, but the webserver rewrites the URL that points to the original URL. Pretty much the same thing. And google indexes that URL plus the html on the page. Is that about right? That is why I should not worry at all.