Check out the Search Engine Optimization guide. So far I’ve talked about SEO basics, on site SEO, SEO design, keyword selection and keyword research, and about identifying long tails. Now it’s time to step it up into big boy SEO; dominating SERPS.
Dominating SERPS is about one thing: Beat EVERYONE in your way. Look at #1, #2, #3 ranked for for the keyword your want. Your ultimate goal is to spank their site into submission.
How is this done? Simple. Read my post about SEO ranking factors. Your goal is to outperform them on every single one of those factors. Optimize better. Design better. Structure your content better. Do everything I talk about in my SEO guide so far. Then get more links. Get more anchored links. Get more deep links. Get higher authority links. Determine what your competition has and BEAT them.
If you’re not competitive and don’t have a killer mentality… GET IT. There are guys out there willing to do ANYTHING to get that #1 ranking.
Find Your Competition
First, you need to determine who your competition is. Perform a Google search on your keyword, look at the top twenty. Those are the sites you’ll need to beat to perform well on Google. More specifically, you’ll want to look at the top 10, since page one gets the most traffic, and most specifically you want to look at the top three ranked sites.
Don’t just look ahead
Competitive analysis isn’t as simplistic as looking at the sites ahead of you. You need to look at who ranks below you. While you’re chasing the guy who holds #1, there are 10 sites chasing you. That brand new site on page 10 pulling in a few hundred links a week will give you hell in 3 months, so do not discount them. Focus on moving forward, but keep a mindful eye on your rear view mirror.
Tools
Lets get into the technical stuff by introducing a few tools.
Keyword Difficulty Tools
These two tools are used to give you an automated score on the competitiveness of a keyword. These work great as general guides. When doing niche research, there is no need to do an in-depth study of the top ranked sites. Just throw the keywords into these tools, get a general score, and take a quick look at the top 3 sites. This will help you chose good keywords.
The first tool is a free tool provided by SEO Chat. You can also find a keyword difficulty tool at SEOMoz. It is only open to premium members though. I believe it performs a more in-depth check, which makes it more resource intensive. If you join SEOMoz premium, use my affiliate link please.
Sites / Domain Research Tools
These tools perform some general research on domains, which can be used to get a better understanding of your competition.
dnscoop
This site is used to determine the value of a domain. It outputs basic information like PR, Age, Links, and Traffic. This provides a very general assessment of your competition.
spyfu
This can help you spy on your competition. Determine what keywords they’re ranking for and what they spend their advertising dollars on.
Firefox SEO Tools
Here are a few add ons I suggest installing for Firefox.
SEO for Firefox – I wrote a brief tutorial for this plugin, check out my SEO for Firefox tutorial.
Review SEO Factors
To out rank a site, you need to out perform its SEO factors. I’ve written about them before, but I’ll point out some of the most important ones here.
- Age
- Title
- Header Tags
- Keyword usage
- Keyword in first 100 words
- Link volume
- Link Anchor Text
- Link authority
- Link relevance
We’ll work through these manually, but you might consider signing up for SEOMoz’s SEO Tools, which can return a lot of this information for you.
You’ll want to read my Search Engine Optimization guide (work in progress). It covers the content and design SEO factors. You want your one site content to be optimized better than your competition’s.
Competative Link Analysis
When doing these searches, don’t forget to check both www and non www versions of the domain.
Determine Link Volume
Using Yahoo! Site Explorer
search domain.com
This will return all in links to a domain.
In Link Anchor Text
Use Yahoo Search
linkdomain:domain.com “keywords” – site:domain.com
This will return all links that include the searched keywords. This will help you determine how strong they hold their rankings.
Link Research Using SEOQuake
No need for me to write about this; Mark over at Courtney Tuttle’s blog wrote a great article about how to replicate your competition’s links with seoquake.
Check Out SEOMoz
SEOMoz has some cool tools to help you research your competition, they also have a lot of articles and resources about SEO. I have a membership there myself.
Conclusion
Competitive analysis is about evaluating your competition’s SEO factors. Your goal is to outperform them by out-optimizing them and gathering more related keyword anchored links. The advice in this post is a brief introduction to getting a peak at why they hold their ranking. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I’ll do by best to help.
Post is part of our Search Engine Optimization Guide, that teaches basic SEO
Related Posts:
Free Keyword Research Tools
SEO Tools
Keyword Selection & Difficulty
Google Keyword Tool Changes
How to Use That Keyword Traffic Estimate
{ 3 comments }
How do you go for “postion one” when google products from google base has that spot. Are they ranking for that spot or are they just listed there? Any ideas on how to overcome this?
It is from Google’s universal search, where they try to insert relevant information from multiple verticals, like news, images, and video. Some of these are subtractive, which means they hold a rank. Many times though, these site display independent of the 10 rankings.
They some times appear mixed into the rankings, but they usually sit at the top and bottom of the search results. There isn’t a whole lot to be done about these.
Here is a really good article about Google universal search.
http://searchengineland.com/080130-103249.php
It would be easy to explain with an example, Justin especially for noobs like me.
For link volume you said: domain.com in yahoo site explorer.
If link volume means number of inlinks, is n’t
link:domain.com is the right search query.
for example= link:seozombie.com in yahoo search.
correct me if i am wrong.
2) same way the second one, Link anchor text.
Did not understand. Please explain with an example.
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