Monday, June 1, 2009

Reasearching Competition

First off I want to thank the followers and readers from technorati you guys have pushed me up into the top 500k. For anyone new to this site please add this to your favs in technorati there is a button off to the side. Anyway on to the post!!

When you first build a website marketing campaign there is always alot of questions and the majority of these questions can be answered doing appropriate searches on your competitors. I think the best two questions that can be answered and are at the core of website marketing are

1st How many backlinks will I need to reach the first page of Google

2nd What is the keyword density used by the top websites in your niche

Let's focus on backlinks to begin. When doing research for a particular term type it into google and get a grasp of competition. Now some competitors that you should avoid are .edu links and wikis. It is nearly impossible to gain more importance even through an incredible link building campaign. So once you have found the keywords that fit your site and the competitors are composed of .com, .org, and other sites possible to beat make sure the keywords are worth going after. Personally I prefer the Google Adwords https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal just put the keywords into the box and then select exact in the match type and google will bring in the number of searches done in the previous month. If you would like to measure the trends of a keyword over a period of time then a better tool would be http://www.google.com/insights/search/#. I have found this very useful when trying to understand why I am not getting organic traffic from a specific keyword during a certain amount of time. Anyway sorry about that let's get back to backlinks and competitors. Once you have decided on your keywords look at the first ten results; these guys will be your direct competition and you will need to be attempting to out build them with your backlinks. If you want to check their backlinks my favorite tool is going to yahoo search and using the link: in front of their URL. The search will bring up a list of every site linking to your competitor. Now if you really want to get an edge on your competition I recommend going down the list and commenting on blogs they have commented on and requesting link exchanges with websites that have their URL on them. You should be spending at least one hour daily looking through what new websites are linking to your competitors and trying to keep up with them. You will also see the number of backlinks you will need to compete with certain sites when using the yahoo link: tool.

As any veteran webmaster/blogger knows backlinks are not everything. Back years ago if you received a couple thousand backlinks it usually meant that you were dominating your niche; no adays keyword density is very important and you will want the keyword or phrase more densely in you content than your competitors. To check your keyword density use this tool http://www.keyworddensity.com/ and once you check which terms are most prevalent and what the density is of your keywords match them against the top sites in your niche. Let me give you an example, just recently I made the top 10 for make money free and how I did this was going through the top ten websites and I made sure that I had just as many backlinks and the density for the keyword phrase make money free was higher than theirs. Now I get plenty of organic Google traffic for my efforts meaning I am making much more money then when I did not rank well for this term. Next of course I will be attempting the coveted make money keywords which of course has much stiffer competition. Anyway if you do proper research on your competition you will gain an understanding of the amount of work that it will take to beat them on Google SERPs. Before you begin make sure the work is worth it by checking the amount of search volume the keyword or phrase gets by using the adwords tool I showed you above.

Well to conclude I hope you enjoyed the post and it will be helpful in your quest of gaining rank within the SERPs and beating out the competition. Remember this blog has the no follow attribute removed so you will receive a link back. I would like to ask a favor from those who found this useful-will you please give me a backlink I have found the website marketing niche to be one of the most competitive and if this blog has helped then I would really appreciate if you could throw me a link on your website/blog or even a submission to a directory or a reference on a forum everything helps. Anyway tell me what you think about the post in a comment below:)

3 comments:

  1. I also use the command related: and link: with the main competitors to check out what they do or have done.

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  2. Very nice internet marketing, it would be nice if you would leave a comment as such your name @ internet marketing so I don't have to call you internet marketing:)

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  3. I learned something new from you again. If all the other experts had explained this as clearly as you did, I would not get so confused and feel like I was left hanging in the middle, not that I am blaming them for the slow progress of my internet marketing. Its just that sometimes its like they are only sharing half the info and keeping everything else they know secret.

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