Judging Competitions in the SERPs

Hello everyone,

I have a question that had bothered me for a long time, and I decided to ask it here since I'm sure someone will have the experience. Anyway, here's the question:

What do I want to see in the Google SERPs?

Yes, I know I want to see...

1. Articles from article directories(EzineArticles, etc.)
2. Yahoo! Answers.

But what about these:

1. eHow.
2. YouTube.
3. Subpages from major sites, MSN, Yahoo!, CNN, ABCNews, etc.
4. WikiHow.
5. WikiAnswers.
6. Social Bookmark sites, Digg, Reddit, etc.
7. Subpages from Amazon.

Thanks in advance!

do you mean what would I rather see in SERPs for a keywork I was going to target?

strange, initially I thought your first list

1. Articles from article directories(EzineArticles, etc.)
2. Yahoo! Answers.

because i thought it would be hard to rank against the might of the big boys in your second list

1. eHow.
2. YouTube.
3. Subpages from major sites, MSN, Yahoo!, CNN, ABCNews, etc.
4. WikiHow.
5. WikiAnswers.
6. Social Bookmark sites, Digg, Reddit, etc.
7. Subpages from Amazon.

BUT

thinking about it, if the front page is not bogged down with 'Articles' and other seo crap, the you could use the viral marketing power of these big boys - youtube wiki etc - to really get some good traffic and SERPs for the keyword.

use siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com to find out how many backlinks your competitors on the first page have, its not a perfect way of exploring your competition, but its a must do.

Well I don't know if I should try to outrank the second-list-webpages.

wakka, Market Samurai does the SEO Analysis.

Help please.

@ SRLee - It's hard to understand what you are asking from your posts, but I take it you want to know about whether or not you should go after a keyword after looking at the competition...?

When you look at your comp. you don't want to just look at the number of competing pages in quotes. This only part of the process.

Like Wakka pointed out, you also want to make sure to see where your competitions backlinks are coming from.

You also want to see what pages are ranking on Page 1 for your keyword without quotes. If there are a lot of authority sites and/or .edu .gov sites in the top 5, then you pretty much won't get past them. If there are web 2.0 sites, articles, forums, video, etc(sites with user generated content) ranking in the top, then you can take the top spots.

This brings me to my next point - opportunities. Anytime you see articles, web 2.0 sites, etc ranking on page 1, this tells you that Google ranks that type of content for that keyword. This is an opportunity for you to put out the same type of content and get ranked as well.

If you have the time, you may also want to see how many pages/posts/backlinks the competing sites are gaining per week. This will show you how active your competitor is, and therefore how active you will have to be.

yes, the youtube video's and wiki's have a high rank.

I understand from your post that youtube, ezine, digg submission are ranking high then your actual webpage.

Your webpage will take at least one month to come above all these.

but your webpage will always be ranked higher than the single webpage from article directories and social bookmarking sites, because there you have created just one web page whereas for on your site you are working regularly.

Georgy said:

yes, the youtube video's and wiki's have a high rank.

I understand from your post that youtube, ezine, digg submission are ranking high then your actual webpage.

Your webpage will take at least one month to come above all these.

but your webpage will always be ranked higher than the single webpage from article directories and social bookmarking sites, because there you have created just one web page whereas for on your site you are working regularly.

Click to expand...

So use those sites to outrank/take over those spots. There's no need to sit around and wait a month for your own website to outrank anything if there are windows of opportunity sitting right there in front of you.