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Nov 25, 2014

Try to Analyze the Competition


Great, so “cat pictures” gets a lot of searches, but will it be very easy or very difficult to rank for? That’s step #2 for me–analyzing the competition for the search terms I want to target. I do this by going to the search engines and checking the results for the keywords.


I tend to focus on Yahoo first, MSN second, and never really focus on Google because it takes months to rank for anything in Google. Frankly I’d rather focus my efforts on the two search engines that are responsible for 45% of search traffic (Yahoo and MSN) than focus all of my efforts on Google (a common mistake). Google only gets 30% of search traffic, and it takes anywhere from 6 months to a year to rank in Google. I always get ranked in Yahoo and MSN much faster.

So if Google eventually ranks me well due to my efforts with Yahoo and MSN, fine, if not, whatever. If you’ll recall from the Triple Your AdSense CTR ebook (which you need to get from AdSenseGold.com and read if you haven’t already), Yahoo and MSN visitors give much better click through rates on AdSense and YPN ads anyway, so ranking in those engines will be healthier for your bottom line.
Adsese


Pretend that my blog is not #1 for a bit.

The first thing I noticed is that of the top 10 results, 3 had almost nothing to do with cat pictures at all. There was a site in there about cat health and at care, and a cat ezine, etc. That’s a sign that it will be pretty easy to rank for the keywords, because if 3 of the top 10 are ranking for keywords that they obviously are not optimizing for, if I focus my attention and efforts on optimization for the keywords, it’s quite likely I’ll succeed.

Also, of the top 10 results, only 3 had the exact phrase “cat pictures” in the title. Having the exact phrase in the title (and especially having the exact phrase BE the title) is a powerful SEO technique, so if only a few of the results have the exact phrase in the title, that’s another sign that
competition is light.
Finally, I check the number of in-bound links for the top 3 results. That’s easy to do. Just do a search for “link:
Here’s an example of how it will look:
Here are the results (again, pretend that my blog isn’t #1 for a second):
1. http://cats.about.com/od/catpictures - 8,070 in-bound links
2. http://www.catanddogpictures.com/ - 5,190 in-bound links
3. http://www.xmission.com/~emailbox/graphics.htm - 2,900 in-bound links

At first glance it might look like it’s going to be really difficult to rank for “cat pictures”. I mean, it would take a lot of time and hard work to get 8,000+ in-bound links to compete with about.com’s cat pictures page. And we all know that links are what really matter, right? Ok, it’s time to dispell a few myths about in-bound links here.

Two Common Myths About In-bound Links
 
Myth #1: Having tons of in-bound links will automatically rank your site very well.
FALSE.
Tons of in-bound links will only rank your site well if those links contain the keywords that you want to rank for. Say you have a site about speed boats. If you get 8,000 in-bound links whose link text is “fast boats”, you might rank very well for “fast boats”, but you won’t rank well at all for “speed boats”–unless there’s just not much competition for the keywords “speed boats”.

Having thousands of people with links that do not contain your keywords will help a little, but quality links that contain the keywords (or better yet, where the link text is the exact keywords) are 50 times more valuable. That means you need 50 times less links to rank well.

So how do you know if a ranking page has in-bound links that are actually related to the keywords you want to target? How do you know if they are really optimizing for the keywords or if they are ranking well only because there’s not much competition?

It’s incredibly important that you know if your competition’s links are targeted to your keywords or not, and there’s an easy way to get this information which I’ll get to in a little bit.



Myth #2: The number of results returned for the “link:” command in a search engine is the number of links that the search engine actually counts toward the ranking of the page.
FALSE.
For the about.com cat pictures page, Yahoo reports 8,070 in-bound links. But I’m going to teach you a powerful little trick to find out how many in bound links Yahoo is applying to the ranking of that about.com page. Go to the Yahoo search home page:
Adsense

Click on the “advanced search” link next to the search button. I’ve circled it in the image below:
In the “All of these words” input box, enter the link: command for the about.com page:


Again, here’s an image of what it looks like:



Now scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, and change the number of results from 10 to 100, then click the “Yahoo! Search” button.
Here’s a snapshot of the results:

Oh my God! Now Yahoo shows 10,500 results! I can’t compete with that! Ok, overreaction. Don’t get too worried yet. Scroll down to the bottom of the results page to where it shows the links for the additional search results pages.
Google Search

Wait a minute. There’s only TWO pages of results! Two pages of results at 100 results per page means... um... 200 links or less. Click on the page 2 link and scroll to the bottom of the results page.
Google Search

Yup, there are only 170 linking pages listed in the results. Why only 170 when Yahoo shows between 8,000 and 10,000 links in the results figure? The page explains at the bottom:
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed.”

here’s your answer: almost all of those 8 to 10 thousand links were considered “duplicate” links by Yahoo. This usually happens when one domain has a link on every page of its site that points to the ranking page. That domain may have 2,000 pages, and so there might be 2,000 links pointing to the ranking page, so Yahoo includes that full figure in the “Results” count. But it only actually counts a few of those links (or maybe even just one) toward the ranking of the page.

So what you may have thought was really serious competition turns out to be much more moderate. I’m going to compete with a page that has only 170 in-bound links that Yahoo pays any attention to, not a page that has 8 or 10 thousand. That’s much more doable.

But when I did my research, I knew that I didn’t need 170 in-bound links either, because I knew that the links to the about.com page were not well optimized for the keywords “cat pictures”. How did I know that? I’ll tell you all about it in a little bit.

Now that I know that I have a good chance to rank for “cat pictures” without too much effort, I’ll move on to the on-page optimization.







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