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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course
Lesson No.18 -
Beating Your Competition
by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
To be the best, you’ve got to beat the best. Top ranking sites
all have something in common, and that’s the fact that they have better SEO work
than all the other sites.
Not only did they do better with on-site optimization,
they are dominating the search engines with their off-site optimization work.
Today I’m going to show you how to outrank those sites!
The Art of War
In order to get a top ranking in the search engines, you need not to have a
perfect page, but instead, you need to have a page that is better than your
competition. This may sound innocent, but it’s a very important concept for you
to understand when it comes to SEO. To outrank your competition, you need to be
able to do better than them on 2 levels:
• On-site optimization
• Off-site optimization
Now, what I’m going to say may sounds over simplistic, but
way to many of you overlook the importance of the following fact:
“If you don’t know what your competition is doing, how are you going to beat
them?” You need information to be able to gauge their current level and where
you stand in comparison. In general, having a very well optimized site when it
comes to on-site optimization alone, will get you all the way to the top 30
results and maybe even to the top 10 depending of the difficulty of your
keyword.
That step was previously accomplished by following the
recommendation we got from our IBP report. What is left for us to do now is
off-site optimization. When you make it to the top 30, outranking your
competition is all about your inbound links.
The only way you can increase your ranking position is by
building more and better quality inbound links than your competition. Your very
first goal should not be to compare yourself to the top ranking page yet, but
rather the lowest ranking page of the top 10 results.
The reason is clear; this is the page you need to beat in
order to make it to the first page of results. Being on the first page and being
on the second page are worlds apart when it comes to SEO results!
Competitive Intelligence
In order for us to outrank this page, we must absolutely know the following
information:
• How many backlinks do they have with our keyword in
their anchor text? The real ranking strength of a page comes from the amount of
backlinks it got with the keyword in the anchor text, this is a number you must
beat in order to outrank this page.
• What is the status of those pages that link back? All pages linking back don’t
have the same level and amount of popularity and authority, evaluate how many
authority backlinks they are getting and get more and better ones than them.
• What are those pages URLs? Those people are linking towards this page that
means if you were to get links too from those same pages, you could at least
match that page, which is a first step to outrank them.
• How many different domains are they coming from? Remember that even more
important than the number of links is also the number of different domains, the
more domains is linking toward a page, the more authority and popularity it will
acquire.
• What is the keyword density of their anchor text? Anchor text is very
important but you don’t want to fall into the Google Link Trap box where you
over-optimize your anchor text and end up being penalized for it. Make sure to
match the density used by your competitor.
• What anchor text variation are they using? Your competitor is likely to be
using different anchor text variations, found out which one they are using, and
leverage on this knowledge.
Not only do you need to know this information about your competitor, you also
need to know this information about your own page in order to make a proper
comparison.
Get the Right Tool for the Right Job
I wish there was a free way to do this, but honestly it’s just not realistic to
go through the tens of thousands of backlinks a site has, look on each of those
pages what is the anchor text, page rank and other info your need from each of
those page, all by yourself manually. You must get a professional SEO software
for this, and if you have any bit of understanding about ROI, you’ll quickly
realize that using such tool actually save you money, not only for the results
you’ll obtain, but for the time you’ll save.
Remember that your time has a dollar value! That said, the
tool I recommend and wouldn’t be doing SEO without is SEO Elite.
The very first step is to make a search in Google for my keyword phrase, here;
Australian Search Engine Optimisation Training
Since I’m already in the top 10, my goal will be to become the top ranking site
for this search term. Just from this page of results, I learn a lot:
• There are 814,000 pages. That’s not a lot of competition here, I’m glad I
made it to the top 10 already within 2 months!
• #2 is a site from a search engine guru, Mr Clay! This means that I will have to beat
him to become #1; easier
said than done!
• #1 is http://www.searchtempo.com/ ...a broken link! Shouldn't be too
hard to beat. It’s now time for me to fire up
SEO Elite! I
run a new project to analyse the backlinks of my competitors.
I now know now exactly what I need to do in order to outrank my competition and
enjoy my search engine domination as #1 in Google for my search term! If that’s
not golden information for you, I don’t know what is.
Exercise
If you can afford it, I strongly recommend you to acquire
SEO Elite. If you are
really serious about your SEO, this is probably one of the most important piece
of software you could ever get.
Seriously, even if you don’t get any other software, this one is a must have,
anyway, there’s a 8 weeks full refund guaranty if you don’t like it, but trust
me if you try it, you’ll keep it! Try
SEO Elite now!
1. Learn How
to Sort Out the Competition
2. Do
Your Keyword Research Homework
3. Refining
Your Keywords
4.
Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.
Mapping Your Site Structure
6.
Understanding Links & PageRank
7. Sculpting Your Site Structure
8. Cascading Style Sheet
Design
9. Using Wordpress
for SEO
10.
Setting up Your Analytics
11.
Engineering the Title Tag
12.
Optimising The Content
13.
Optimising The Description Tag
14.
Building Internal Links
15.
SEO & Images
16.
OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17.
Link Building 101
18.
Beating Your Competition
19.
Building External Links
20.
Using Structured SEO
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