Thread:SEOkitten/@comment-5175866-20151013205931/@comment-26321732-20151023171103

It is tough to pin down the exact reasons for a single search result (commerical search engines build their businesses around hiding that information), but the Joseph page is both detailed and has excellent documentation. It also includes the answers to some of the most common long tail queries about Joseph at the top of the page (e.g. Who was Joseph's father in the Old Testament?).

Part of the organic search strength of Biblicalapedia is also inherted from Wikia as a whole since subdomains are granted a portion of the parent domain's external link value. Even when there is not a link to the page in question, our domain authority often provides a boost.

85-90% of traffic on Wikia comes from search engines and the rest comes through other sources (e.g. direct, referal links, social sharing, etc.). Unfortunately I do not have exact traffic numbers broken out at the subdomain (wiki) level, so I am not sure if this hold true for bible.wikia.com or not. This is something our team hopes to build and surface to the users in the near future!

I do know that the search terms that bring the greatest amount of clicks are articles that other websites don't seem to have (or don't have a lot of information about). "Ethbaal," "serpent," and "who was caligula in the bible" each bring almost as much traffic as "Joesph old testament."

Best practice for page names and titles is to put the most important term first, so I like the convention of naming article pages something like Joseph or Joseph (Patriarch). Matching queries to page names exactly is a bit outdated as an SEO practice. I recommend including those related, commonly searched terms in the first paragraph (e.g. "The Old Testament patriarch Joseph first appears in the book of Genesis.) The other page content takes care of disambiguation between the patriarch and Jesus's father.

Search engines tend to rank Wikipedia highest for informational queries that  should  have a simple answer (e.g. When was Lincoln born? What is the capital of Poland?) and common queries around the Bible seem to be included in this group. Human search users know that "who is Jesus?" is complex question that cannot be answered in an instant answer blurb, but Google in particular is attempting to provide that information through machine learning that is still prone to errors or oversimplification.

Hope that helps! Let me know if any of this is unclear or you have additional questions.