shair

Share

Tuesday 7 February 2012

How To Reverse-Engineer Your Competition

Do you have a site in a competitive market and want to determine how your top-
ranked competitors are doing so well. This involves reverse-engineering the linking
structure of the top 3-5 sites in your keyword space and emulating what they are
doing right. Here is how to go about doing it:

1. Use Yahoo's backlink command, or software such as SEO Elite
(http://www.seoelite.com) find every site that is linking to the top 3 sites in your
chosen keyword in Google.

2. Obtain links from those exact sites that your competitors are getting links from.
This takes time so be patient.

3. Use the same anchor text that is pointing to the competition’s sites for your own
incoming links. Try to duplicate the percentage of different anchor text variations
used – this is important.

4. Look at the page titles of the #1 site and duplicate them for your site. You don't
need to do this for all your pages, just your most important ones - home page,
important category/product/service pages.

Why reinvent the wheel? Your competition has already figured out how to rank well,
so you should emulate their strategies.

Bear in mind that site age and link age is a factor, so even if you duplicate your
competitor's link-building strategies 100%, it is going to take time for you to rank well
as the new links to your site won't be as good as the old links that your competitors
have.


How Much Competition Do You Really Have?

Some people are confused about the true number of online competitors for a given
keyword phrase, particular when using keyword research tools or looking at the
number of returned pages in Google. Many such "competing pages" are what are
called "accidental competitors" - they aren't necessarily trying to beat you in search
engine ranking, they just happen to use the term somewhere on a page.

If you want to get an accurate number of other sites that are optimizing their
pages for a given search term, follow these steps. Open Google and follow these
steps using your keyword phrase:


No comments:

Post a Comment