I would like to show you my SEO competition for a new business competing for a keyword ( one of many of course dur...) My first concern is that the competition are extraordinarily established companies with DA as long as 9 years...and a shite load of link juice.. The question here is - if you were me - looking at the competition... would you pack up and go home? You can see my screen shot... Whilst I have a site that will divert traffic to the site and 14.000 email addresses which are marginally targeted... I am going to get no love from google...
Well, besides the domain age, the thing that springs out to me is that those sites are missing your keywords in a number of tags, whether its title, meta h1 etc So i would say, ignore the amount of backlinks - these can be got easily, the main thing to overcome here is the domain age. And maybe with you getting your tags correct you can overcome this Worth a go in my view Good luck
That's my take on... As you can see the number of deep backlinks is basically strong to everyone, which means, the categories you will choose will have a big impact in your rankings. I say that based on my experience with "jobs" website. My advice is for you to use "Wonder Wheel" feature in Google and use the results as your MAIN CATEGORIES. As you go deeper into the keyword results you can find new subcategories as well that are seen by Google as VERY RELEVANT. *Start building links to the main page and categories pages. *Use the tag "nofollow" on the categories page, so they can keep their strength. *As you create the categories, remember to optimize properly the title, description and content of these, so they can have "life" on their own. *Buying a domain with a seed keyword (jobs) in it would be helpful at this stage. *Aged domain would help to not being flagged (but, still possible) for building links at a fast pace. *Focus on the main keywords for the main page (2 or 3) and use the "sub-niches keywords" for the categories. *Use relevant content for the main and category pages. I hope this overview assist you at least to develop new ideas. All the best.
The other thing I notice and do not understand is how the results I showed you do not have TV or JOBS in their URL - at best one has keyword.restofthedomain which is completely new intel to me, hence my other thread about that specific issue. Shortly speaking - I also have no idea what TAGS are - Having read David Viney's Google book, and three others, and 2 years on this forum nearly and also ranking 3rd on one of my sites. I still have not had AMNYONE be able to explain to me in terms I can understand what H1 Tags are...
Not having the keywords in the URL are OK as long as you have a supporting system of backlinks carrying the keyword as the "anchor-text." But IT IS a plus when in your URL. In simple language "Tags" are "labels" containing a piece of information. I believe you've seen a HTML code of a website. <head></head> <body></body> These are examples of "open" and "close" tags. IN between you will add the information of your website using other "tags." Each one carrying their one function for the website design. <H1></H1> is one of six "Heading" tags used to write and pre-determine the size and importance of the TITLE of your articles (content). H1 is the biggest (size-wise) of all. Search engines used to rely on H1's also to determine what one website was about (content). With the abuse of some "Tags" including "keyword meta tag," they are not as important as before for rankings propose. But it doesn't hurt to have them because there are smaller search engines that still rely on them to determine rankings. I hope it helps a little...layingfi
