Help please - I have just one competitor I need to beat!

[bezzer04]

Hi everyone,

Please could I ask for some help.

I have a WP blog set up in a certain niche that is going to explode in around 3 weeks time. Basically, it is related to an event that happens once a year and it is coming around again soon.

When I carry out all of the related searches on big G, I keep coming up behind this one competitor, and I really need to switch places with him/her!

I am very inexperienced in SEO, the reason my blog is working is pretty much due to the keywords in the domain name.

The competitor's site has been around for a couple of years, and I'm sure he has benefited from the 'explosion' in previous years, but this time I want my turn

So, the question really please is, what tips and tricks might you have for me to help me leapfrog the other site.

Massive thanks and reps coming to all those that can help!

Cheers.

 

[The Captain]

oh to be Irish

 

[bezzer04]

oh to be Irish

Sounds funny, but I don't get it

 

[The Captain]

I thought you might be advertising St Patrick's day.

 

[bezzer04]

Aaaah, I see - cool

No, not St. Paddy's - to be fair I think there would be a lot more than one competitor for that...

Sorry I can't just come out and say what it is, but you know the deal...

What I will say guys is this - I am preparing for and hope to dominate the UK version of this event, but it actually happens in many (most) other countries too at different times of the year. Anyone who helps will be advised by PM of the niche as soon as the UK one dies down - hope that sounds fair?

 

[The Captain]

Sorry I can't just come out and say what it is,

well how do you expect us to help if you wont tell us your secrets?

 

[bezzer04]

Lol, I know, how bad am I?

 

[PinkThong]

Have you researched your main competitor in terms of keywords in content, back links, PR of those back links as well as the anchor text for the back links, internal vs external back links and the type of sites that the links are coming from.

If you can share the overview of what your competitor is doing to rank ahead of you, that you are not doing, then maybe we can suggest how to go about beating them.

Once you've done the research you may well find the answers are self evident.

 

[bezzer04]

Have you researched your main competitor in terms of keywords in content, back links, PR of those back links as well as the anchor text for the back links, internal vs external back links and the type of sites that the links are coming from.

If you can share the overview of what your competitor is doing to rank ahead of you, that you are not doing, then maybe we can suggest how to go about beating them.

Once you've done the research you may well find the answers are self evident.

THANK YOU Pinkthong for your very detailed reply, unfortunately though, my answer is no I haven't - I don't know how to do half of those things

Maybe it isn't as simple as I thought, but I was kinda hoping that maybe I would get instructions like;

Get a link on site A, site B, site C

Ping with site A, site B

And so on...does that make any sense?

Let me perhaps put it another way, and apologies for being such a noob at SEO - will knowing what my competitor has actually help me to beat him? Perhaps it will be impossible for me to outgun what he has achieved, but maybe a few BH 'shortcuts' can have a similar effect?

Anyone see where I am coming from?

Thanks again PinkThong, I'll hit the thanks button right now.

 

[Didcot]

I'm new to this myself but can I suggest downloading a trial copy of Market Samuri and have a play with it. Also watch the videos to learn how to use it.

From that you should be able glean what your competitor is doing to outrank you and from there it's just a matter of copying what they have done, doing the same and then surpass them.

 

[dizz]

xrummer your site and build backlinks and get a linkwheel that will help.

 

[PinkThong]

No problem Bezzer04, we all started where you are at. I'll give you an indication of what I do when trying to rank for a keyword phrase.

And by the way, although this is a blackhat forum, I wouldn't really consider myself blackhat. I've tried various techniques and ideas here and made some good money from them but in the end, you really want to develop a more white/grey hat approach if you don't have the coding skills. I'm really just a copycat rather than an innovator. That's just my opinion because I've found that blackhat methods do work, but the work required to keep them going is substantial with the constant threat of being banned or the method not working for whatever reason.

You can use tools like xrummer or any other automated linking tool or comment generator but each one comes with a steep learning curve and a downside which can bite.

Anyway...

1. Keyword phrase research.

Using Google's Keyword Tool to find all the relevant, related keyword phrases you can then rank the phrases by exact search, global search. This way you can see if it's worth your while to go after the phrase. 85% of my income comes from Adsense so I concentrate on targeting those phrases that exceed 2000 searches per month with average cpc of $4. In the most of the niches I rank in I can expect to receive between .25 and .33 X Average CPC in Adsense income per click.

I also calculate the quantity of traffic I can get based on the #1 position. This does vary but based on the last 3 years I can expect between 35-55% of the estimated global searches for the #1 SERP.

With CTR's of between 6 - 23% on average (each day can vary as much as less than 1% to over 200% CTR on some pages) I then calculate the value I can expect from each phrase. At first these where thumb-sucks but I can now be pretty certain of what I'm going to earn when I hit the #1 spot.

The point here is to establish whether it's worth pursuing a particular keyword phrase or not.

2. Competitor Analysis

Now based on the keyword phrases from 1. above you want to do a Google Search from Firefox using the SEO for Firefox extension. That will give the PR, site and page back links as as well as various other info about each search result for each of your keyword phrases.

Anything below PR3 is pretty easy to beat out using targeted, keyword anchored text in your back links.

Click Y! Page Links and you will be taken to the Yahoo "Link:" results for that particular page. Go through the results and take note of the number of results (Not accurate but good enough for our purposes) as well as the PR of each link page as well as what the link to your competitor is. Is it anchored with the phrase or not?

I do this for each link and each keyword phrase. It's a lot of work but you will then know what you have to do to beat that web page for that phrase.

Create a spreadsheet with the KW, number of PR0-9 links, how many are anchored with the exact phrase you want to rank for then go out and get them plus some more.

You will be amazed at the number of times you can outrank a page with a few well placed, correctly anchor text rich links.

You will also know whether it's worth your while to purchase a few high PR links to boost your results for a month or two. It becomes less hit-or-miss and more targeted.

I use the SEO Book tool bar that has the Search Engine Ranking Checker to keep track of where I'm ranking for each phrase that I target. I also check my site logs regularly to see if any new keywords are showing up that might benefit from some back link effort.

I've found that using the Back Linking and Indexing Tool that's in the downloads section gave my pages a boost within 48 hours after running it.

Almost forgot, you will want to pay attention to the nofollow links in the results.

I don't use any of the paid keyword tools as I haven't felt that I needed them. My keyword research takes up 25% of my time followed by back linking 70% and then content.

Almost forgot, you also want to place 1 - 3 links on your page to authority sites in your niche. After doing this a noticed a definite improvement in ranking over the following weeks.

You can create back links from forums, blogs, blog comments, YouTube (try tube mogul.com), article directories, Squidoo, Hubpages, RSS feeds and the list goes on, you'll find plenty of resources here.

I've found that the BH methods here help me understand what works and more importantly how to think outside the box.

Look for the sites that give your competitor good quality links in terms of their PR, niche relevance, authority and then get links on those sites too plus more.

Hope that helps.

 

[bezzer04]

Wow, thank you PT, that's an incredible reply!

I need to read it a few more times and try to understand it all, but wow, thanks for all that effort, really appreciate it.

Rep added!

 

[PinkThong]

Cool, glad I could help. I've pm'd you some info. Let me know if you're interested.

 

[nathanooo2]

Hope you have learnt well now.Build some quality links to stay upwards from your competitors.