[Elbow Grease] Assessing Ranking Difficulty / Competition

Hi everyone,

Like many here I'm a beginner. There's lots for us newbies to learn, test and tweak. To be honest, the amount of information here is quite overwhelming and it's quite difficult to tell good advice from bad. This makes it quite difficult for some of us to get started.

I have a proposition to have a few threads that cover the basics of manual and free techniques. Experienced users can describe their methods that us newcomers would greatly appreciate.

Let's prefix these threads with [Elbow Grease] followed by title of what's it addressing.

Hope these thread series can take off.

So let's start with determining the difficulty of ranking a page on search engine's first page.

let's say the keyword is "indoor tennis table". How would you assess difficulty and when do you decide it's worth your effort?

P.S. Is there an acronyms thread anywhere? It would be nice to have something to reference for lingo.

DeSearchify said:

Hi everyone,

Like many here I'm a beginner. There's lots for us newbies to learn, test and tweak. To be honest, the amount of information here is quite overwhelming and it's quite difficult to tell good advice from bad. This makes it quite difficult for some of us to get started.

I have a proposition to have a few threads that cover the basics of manual and free techniques. Experienced users can describe their methods that us newcomers would greatly appreciate.

Let's prefix these threads with [Elbow Grease] followed by title of what's it addressing.

Hope these thread series can take off.

So let's start with determining the difficulty of ranking a page on search engine's first page.

let's say the keyword is "indoor tennis table". How would you assess difficulty and when do you decide it's worth your effort?

P.S. Is there an acronyms thread anywhere? It would be nice to have something to reference for lingo.

Click to expand...

Curious about this too. Hope someone responds

Personally, I would analyze the top rankers first. Check to see if images have alt tags or if the title & description tags look optimized. This would give me an understanding if the competition has any seo work done. If it seems like they do, I would then start analyzing their backlinks to determine the level of linkbuilding I will have to do.

If the top three results are amazon, wikipedia, and youtube (or similar... ebay,walmart,yahoo,etc.) then just walk away...

Take measurements on page one results... how many keyword matches in HTML source, how many backlinks, how old are the sites...?

Is there room for you to be competitive on page one with your time and resources?

If all that looks good then go for it but be ready to struggle for at least 10 months... Google has pretty much determined that amount of time is when most webspammers quit. So that is the time you get full credit for your backlinks. You wont know where you rank until you hit that milestone.

Googles factors are additive so typically you can make up for a deficit in one area by overcompensating in other areas. Matt Cutts claims that there is a point of diminishing returns on keyword stuffing, but the data from serps very strongly suggests this isn't true... I'd say exact matches in title,description and content and keyword stuffing are 50% of getting to page one... then for low to medium competition niches a small amount of linkbuilding will put you over the top... being aggressive in content tuning can minimize the amount of backlinking you'll have to do.