IMHO the way to look at your content is not as one article with 31 pages, but instead as 31 related articles about a topic.

So your first/top page will target the main keyword phrases (naturally) and each subsequent page should be focused on a particular sub-topic to target "long tail" keyword phrases. Link between all the pages using the appropriate keyword phrases, not generic terms like "Page 2 >" or "Next Page". Use the "inverted pyramid" style of writing. You should also use appropriate keyword phrases in your structural markup (title, h1, h2, etc), again naturally.

These are user-friendliness issues as much as they are SEO issues: if you concentrate on creating user-friendly content, structure and navigation you should end up with pages that are highly SE-optimised automatically.

I don't think it's absolutely necessary to change your URLs to use a keyword-rich URL, but it may help a bit. The way to change a URL is to "301 redirect" the old URL to the new one. Good URLs don't change, so if you do change the URLs now, aim to come up with good, concise, user-friendly URLs that you won't have to change again in future.

Also, you may want to break down your 31 pages into sections/topics and sub-topics, like "theme pyramids" eg:

Main topic page
- Sub Topic 1 page
- - Sub Topic 1 Detail 1 page
- - Sub Topic 1 Detail 2 page
- Sub Topic 2 page
- - Sub Topic 2 Detail 1 page
- - Sub Topic 2 Detail 2 page
- - Sub Topic 2 Detail 3 page
...etc

HTH

@ mattur : tnx for the reply and the suggestions.

Yes, it might be a good idea to target more keywords with the other pages. But this will be a huge job, so I will first try to target one keyword-phrase.

Out of the first 10 hits in Google for my keyword-phrase, 6 of them don't have any words of that phrase in their url-name. So I should be possible to do it with that name change.

I rewrote the first page using as many keywords as I could throughout the page. so this should be okay.

Next is to get some extra links and therefor I have a question.

My main page : "mysite.com" had a PR of 3, the starting page of that article : "mysite.com/article.html" has also a PR of 3.

Now my question : Will my article also benifit from a increase in PR of my main page or is it wise to focus completely on the improvement of the PR of the article-page?

It depends on which page has the higher rating for your keyword. If the home page is rating then I would work on that. Many times Google will then show a second page if it is also on topic. You also need to consider which page will it be easier to get links to.

Out of the first 10 hits in Google for my keyword-phrase, 6 of them don't have any words of that phrase in their url-name. So I should be possible to do it with that name change.

Changing URLs might hurt more than benefit. It sounds like you already have some links to that page, so if you change URLs you would have to permanently redirect the old to the new. This usually results in a bit of a dip for a while. Unless you really, really, really want to do this, I'd leave well enough alone and keep it as it is.

I rewrote the first page using as many keywords as I could throughout the page. so this should be okay.

Don't go too crazy here, just make sure the page reads naturaly, not forced, as much writing for search engines turns out to be. Instead of repeating keywords and keyphrases, try to weave in related and supporting terms.

My main page : "mysite.com" had a PR of 3, the starting page of that article : "mysite.com/article.html" has also a PR of 3.

Now my question : Will my article also benifit from a increase in PR of my main page or is it wise to focus completely on the improvement of the PR of the article-page?

Sure, if the main page increases in PR it will pass more to the article page. The same with the article page (if it links to the main page), as its PR increases it will pass more PR back to the main page.

I'd focus on the article pages. Treat you main page as what it is -- an index to your site. It's impossible to optimize an idnex page for all the terms you would want to target, that's what the interior pages are for.

You might want to take a look at this theme pyramid [webmasterworld.com] thread. I'ts old, but by no means dated.

Hi,

well I guess I just leave the URL-name the way it is. Should have thought about it before.

@ Jim : well I kept it normal. I just made sure I used the 3 keywords I target where ever I could, but in a normal way, nothing weird.

okay, I'll target the article page more than my home-index page.

Actually I'll managed to get ranked at position 20 (out of nowhere) just by rewriting the page and using the appropriate keywords. but I'm aiming for top5, so still a lot of work to do.

Now I'm doing a link campaign (no directories, just plain sites) where I ask to put a link to the article-page using the exact keywords I target in that link. I think this will make THE big difference.

The theme-thing sound great ... but therefor I should rewrite the whole thing ... not something I'll do for fun. So let's first see if I can manage to get top5 by increasing my links