Reviewing Your Website Competitors
Let's spy on your competitors!
Remember we said earlier that Google ranks web pages, not web sites, so you must rank well for each of your web pages, particularly your sales pages or pages your are the most interested in promoting.
Getting links to those pages is one of the best ways for your page to rank well within the search engines. So by looking at the pages that directly compete with our page, meaning who is linking to those competing pages, we can find out how easy or difficult it is for us to rank well.
So let's get started....
Let's say you have a webpage about "how to have whiter teeth" (include the quotes)
The first thing you want to do is go to Google and type in your best keyword phrase for that page. In this instance our best keyword phrase is "how to have whiter teeth" (include quotes).
At the top of the Google page you will see a line
that says something like this:
About 104,000 results
So there are a lot of pages, however don't let that discourage you. We are going to be checking those web pages and see what links are coming into them.
Here's what to do:
Looking down the page for all the sites that came up for "how to have whiter teeth", start looking at each page and determine which pages are in direct competition with your site, then make a note of those pages.
For example, the first few sites that come up are sites like WebMD, Ehow and wikihow.
These sites will be hard to compete with. That means you'll need to alter your keyword choice somewhat.
I use Wordtracker to help me there. You can follow along with their free trial.
Using Wordtracker I can see that a less competitive keywords would be
-
Whiter teeth at home
-
Make your teeth look whiter
-
Benefits of whiter teeth
I use the paid version of Wordtracker so I may get some more keywords that what you can see, but the idea is to find the keywords that aren't so competitive, giving you a better chance to rank well in the search engines.
Let's say I settle on the keyword phrase 'whiter teeth at home'
Goodhousekeeping and WEbmd come up but we also have a few sites that we can potentially compete with. One of them, at the time of this writing is:
http://www.beautytipsonline.com/teeth-whitening.htm
Next, open another window and go to:
This is where we will check the number of incoming
links for this site:
Type the following into the Yahoo! search box exactly as you see it
here (without the quotes)
'link:http://www.beautytipsonline.com/teeth-whitening.htm (without the quotes)
At the top right hand side of the Yahoo.com page you will see that Yahoo! tells us how many incoming links there are for this page. At the time of this writing I see there are about 48 incoming links to this site.
Where it says 'Show Inlinks:' select 'except from
this domain' Now you'll see the amount of inbound links change to 46 at the time of this
writing. These are the external sites that link to this page.
That is telling me that if I follow all other good search engine
optimization for my site and find at least 46 incoming links, I have a fair chance of making
the first or second page of Google for my keyword phrases.
46 may sound like a lot of links but with a few hours of actively working on this, it won't take long.
Also teeth whitening is a fairly competitive topic, most other niche topics aren't as competitive and you won't have to get as many incoming links to compete.
Start with the sites that you see listed on Yahoo.com that we just captured. Go down the list and find the websites that have linked to this site and ask those sites if they will link to you or exchange links with them.
Happy Spying!
Your Partner In Success
Elizabeth