Analysing your competition.. help?

Hi guys,
So I set up my site, its been about a week now. I don't expect anything special by this point obviously. However, I've looked through the competitors. Top site is an authority site, I'm not going to out rank them for my keyword I'm sure. Second site is shopping site focused on health products. My site is more specific so I reckon I can eventually out rank maybe?

The third site, however, is just an MFA site. And it has 5 backlinks. Below that are sites with way more backlinks. I looked at who these backlinks are from, and one link is PR3 i think, and the rest are 0 and unknown. One of the sites was ehow, and I couldnt get the PR of that. Anyway, I still don't understnad how they are doing so well. There must be another factor, so how I can find out whats going on!? Is the only way I can analyse my competition to check backlinks? Surely not.

Help appreciated!

PR, backlinks (quality over quantity), domain age, h1,h2,h3,etc., keyword density, alt text for images, keyword in domain or subdomain, etc.

PM me your keyword and domain you're using and I'll do a free analysis.

Tom

tbsweet52 said:

PR, backlinks (quality over quantity), domain age, h1,h2,h3,etc., keyword density, alt text for images, keyword in domain or subdomain, etc.

PM me your keyword and domain you're using and I'll do a free analysis.

Tom

Click to expand...

^ lol. The third guy's on-site is probably very good haha, just take a look at it.

I have. I keep looking at it. His keyword density is about the same as me. But he only has 5 links. I'm going to keep adding articles till I've filled my sidebar with links with the keyword in it. Going to yank some videos of youtube too I think, make them my own and then see if I can get some views on the go. I read something about "nested videos" on a site and I might give that a shot, make it a sort of link wheel on my own page with youtube videos on that points to all the "main" pages in the sidebar with my articles, see what happens.

The 5 links he has might just be a lot better than the shitty links the others have. And authority sites ranking can be a good thing, because a lot of the time they'll rank pages for keywords just based on content and internal links. If that's the case, relevant external links can help you quite a bit.

Get a free account here hXXp://rapid.searchmetrics.com and you can get all sorts of data on them and yourself. Tools for on/off site + technical analysis.

Generally if the site really has less backlinks than his onsite seo is much better. Having said that even if he apears to have less backlinks he may not.. have you looked at the sites he is getting backlinks from..Maybe some are his and he may be hammering those with backlinks and passing the linkjuice onto his main site.