Hey guys, I'm in the home based business industry (which is SUPER competitive) and I want to do some BH stuff to get to first page.

Just a few quick questions:

1) How can I tell if my competition is blackhat, or whitehat?

1b) If they are blackhat, what should I do about that keyphrase?

2) I've been tackling long-tailed keywords with a phrase match of like 10k or less, but havn't been getting much traffic. I really want to tackle higher competition keywords, using this method...

http://i613.photobucket.com/albums/t...gstructure.jpg

Any tips?

Thanks!

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The number of matches for a term is no indication of how much traffic there is for that term. I use Google's external keyword tool to estimate how much traffic there is for a search term.

YOU MUST KNOW HOW MUCH TRAFFIC THERE IS ***BEFORE*** you invest any time in trying to rank for that term. Also, is it a "buying" term? If not, again, you're wasting your time.

Thanks, I use tools.seobook.com's (powered by wordtracker) keyword research tool to check the amount of traffic for my search terms. What do you use?

Since there's very high competition in the home business arena, almost all keyphrases with a 10k or less phrase match has very little traffic. (like 10 searches a day or less)

With everything that I'm learning here, I'm willing to tackle higher competition keyphrases that have higher traffic.

There's a keyphrase that has a 50k phrase match count, that i'm thinking of tackling. Any comments would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

The first step to finding out if your competition is using black hat methods to drive traffic is to research there marketing methods. do a back link search for there domain(s), search spam site trackers for there domain and email addresses. etc..etc..

What exactly are spam site trackers? Any resources you'd be able to help me out with? =]

yes interesting... continue...

Hi, I always take a look at the Google Cache of a website which (In the case of cloaking) shows what the Search Engine sees. If a website has the NOARCHIVE meta tag therefore prohibiting the a search engine from archiving the content then I do further investigation. I am not saying that all sites that have the NOARCHIVE tag are cloaking and are blackhat but it is one indicator that they may be doing something blackhat and could warrent further investigation.

Also, use FireFoxs fake useragent plugin to look at the website as Google, provided the website is not doing IP Based cloaking then they might give up some extra goodies as well.

Finally, take a look at the website via translate.google.com, many cloaked systems sometimes show the cloaked page to you

Regards
MDS

To FleshJoe:

You asked, "How can I tell if my competition is BH or WH?"

White Hat marketers make a funny squeaking sound when they walk, due to anal retention.

Cheers! - "Wiz"

ou i've never really thought about my competition doing the same as me... thanks for opening my eyes lol