Use Search Engine Optimization to Destroy Your Competition in 3 Easy
Steps. by Jon Rognerud
Search Engine Optimization Secrets For Your Business
.
(Are you new to the search engine optimization business? Are you in early
stages of building your search engine marketing campaigns? Or, are you already
into building a web site? Read below and try our free SEO tools.)
Let's begin: What is 'competition'? Competition is described as "one that
competes", "a rival", "selling or buying goods or sevices in the same market as
another", and even down to the biological level - "an organism that lives in
competition with another".
SEO & Web - Competitive Landscape. Increasingly, web surfers are using
search engines to find companies, services and goods. Big and smaller
companies, are using search engine optimization and search engine marketing
techniques to beat their competitors. On the Internet, we are dealing with
virtual entities - and we all compete in increasingly tougher and user-aware
market places. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing focuses
on building traffic and allowing you to leverage your websites, services and
products. Through competitive research, optimal keyword strategies, quality
content, link-back neighborhoods and educating yourself on Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), you should be well
positioned to beat the competition -- over time.
What options exist for creating revenue online? A) Search Engine Optimization
and Search Engine Marketing are two fantastic ways in which you can get
visibility on the Internet. Additionally, you can and should include email
marketing strategies, with a complete CRM and backoffice process. You can
increase visibility and competitive edge hundred-fold. Great content with an
intelligent link strategy is vital.
B) Affiliate Marketing Programs. Join and promote these (Mr. Jeff Bezos at
Amazon is famous for this). Create one for your company - with potentially
exciting and lucrative results. (The merchants, or you - offer affiliates
commissions for sales activity generated by the affiliate's web sites).
C) Adsense. A sophisticated affiliate online advertising program from Google.
Complimentary Adsense Training Videos are worth a look. However, without search
engine marketing and search engine optimization, you are missing out on other
huge opportunities for smashing the competition and making large sums online.
D) Adwords. A break-through ad ('sponsored advertising') system from Google
that can bring traffic (quality) to your site within 1/2 hour! The
complimentary adwords email courses show ways to beat the system, and lessen
the frustration on your part. It can get expensive fast.
Create edge and stay competitive with SEO and SEM. You must have a service or
product niche - to create success on the Internet using these 'silent money
making engines'. You need to understand that niche marketplaces is how you get
there, along with sound search engine optimization and search engine marketing
principles, quality content, backlinks and CRM sales backend processes.
Optimization Tip #1: On and off page optimization, what is that, and why is it
important?
First of all you need to create a web site that is a related to a niche
marketplace. (You already know who your customer is, right!?) It is very
important that you do your keyword research first. In fact, competitive
research as an action step is missed by over 98% of the online marketplace.
There are many great keyword tools and many are free. Keep in mind that Google
'owns' over 50% of the search marketplace. (Yahoo receives about 30% and MSN
about 20%). Google is a very important search engine for you to focus on, and I
suggest you start with it (even though MSN and Yahoo are great Subscriptions -
especially the newly launched MSN Adcenter).
Competitive SEO Research: Try the following on yahoo and google (make sure
syntax is correct): site: www.competitor.com. (replace 'competitor' with real
name). It will show you how many pages that each search engine has indexed from
the competitor's site. Depending on the site, many results could be returned.
Look to see if each page has a title and description associated with them. You
will then be able to determine whether each page within your competitor site
has been individually optimized.
When you start researching keywords do not start with the most common keyword.
For example, if you are selling Canon products, do no start researching or
optimizing for the word 'Canon'. You need to break it down - for example - to
'Canon power shot'. Even better -'Canon power shot SD400 memory sticks'. This
way, you have created a niche keyword structure (many permutations from these
keywords) within a larger category, and you will able to better optimize
keywords for this area. With this in mind, go to Google and start typing in
specific keywords and phrases to see where the competition is. As you are doing
this, you should understand the page rank algorithm. It is Google's way of
giving specific value to how popular are popular your web site is. It's
essentially based on the number of votes of other web sites that have cast
votes up for your web site. Votes are generated when another web site places a
link on their web site that is pointing to your web site. The more votes you
get, the better your chances are for good ranking. Try our free SEO tools and
give yourself a kick-start.
To view the page rank, install the Google toolbar (toolbar.google.com). As you
look at the competition, recognize that we talk about on-page and off- page
optimization. On-page optimization are things like proper use of H1 header
tags, using main keywords in the title tags, keywords and phrases are bolded
underlined or italicized, using image tags and placing correct keywords within
that tag. Many place keywords at the very beginning of the text, and once at
the very end of the copy, with other sprinkled throughout the company. It's an
"hour glass" type of a concept. Keywords at the top, less in the middle and
again repeated at the end. Do the things that the competition is doing just do
it a little bit better - this is one way to get one step ahead of them. The
"least imperfect" site wins.
Optimization Tip #2: How does Tagging really work, and why does it matter?
In our example, when we open the Canon landing page you need to start with the
page title for your web site. The page title should only include the main
keywords. (Do not ever say welcome to our web site!) Try to combine the
keywords in your title. Make sure you use the H1 header tag early in your body
text. Also, when Google reads the web page it uses the text from the top
left-hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page.
Next, you would need to create H2 header tags. You can think of that as the sub
heading for a web page. This is a very common used tag, so it's best to place
the primary keyword in your H1 tags and your secondary keywords into your H2
tags.
Now you need to actually create the content for the page. When you try to write
the contents, sprinkle your main keywords throughout the copy. But don't overdo
it, just make it a natural effort. Once you have written the copy you should
then go back and bold underline or italicize some of the keywords. Only one
time each, maximum. There are many HTML site building tools out there that use
the Bold (B) tag for bolding keywords, and has been overused. Google doesn't
penalize you for it, but in fact, by using the tag STRONG it provides higher
quality content for search engines. You can also add some images for your
users, and when you do this you need to properly include the keyworded image
tags. So for example, if we have an image on our web page called 'oneshot.jpg'
you would include code that adds that ALT tag and text about that specific
memory stick (from our Sony example).
Also, Google views your web page from top left to bottom right. Well, in
general they do. However, you want to make sure that you code your HTML to
compliment or support this, specially if you have non-related navigational
elements to the left of page. There are techniques to do this, which is
explained in a great series, try the Free SEO 3-day Email Course.
Optimization Tip #3: Off page search engine optimization - competition to the
ground!
You have come up with your niche marketplace and associated keywords and
phrases into your page. You will have completed proper approach to tagging from
titles through the body content, including H1's, H2's and ALT tags. You are
then ready to get your site indexed. Your first rule, is to never use the
Google submission form. There are better and faster ways.
The first approach You need to know how a search engine finds you in the first
place. They will visit one web site that is already in their index and if they
follow the link to that new site, it could be yours. For example, if you have a
new site and you have a partner in this 'Canon' business space, and he puts a
link to your page and he's already visible on the Internet at Google, they'll
crawl to that site and find your link and get you into the index. Now what if
you don't have a partner in this space in your are brand new, you still can get
into the index. There are article directories that you can submit to, places
like PRWeb.com. Others are - goarticles.com, buzz article.com, article
fever.com and many more. These are excellent sites for you to write something
about your services or products. The engines will pick you out, and Google will
find you. The second approach (and to quickly get listed in the Google index)
Go see your competition. Type in the search terms you are competing with and
find web sites that have a page rank of five or six or higher that you will
notice in the green bar from the Google toolbar (above). Find six or 10 of
these sites and locate their contact information. We have found that e-mail
works - of course - but picking up the phone and commenting on their site and
how discussing how a link partnership could benefit each others, rates higher.
Top ranking sites may ignore you, and it's certainly tougher persuade somebody
to add your link to their web sites. You must give them a good reason to do
this. Contact sites that are related to you and are complimentary - those are
the best. Find good and great link neighborhoods within your topics. And always
think of a way that you can give them something that they would benefit from.
Think of this as an emotional bank account. You make deposits, and you (later)
may make withdrawals. If you can manage to get at least one PR 6 web site to
link your web site, you'll be off and running. You should be indexed in under
three days. If you get a PR 7 web site link to you - in most cases you'll be
there in 24 hours.
The third approach (and why you must be careful here) Purchase links from high
Page Rank websites. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to visit one of
the many link purchasing websites. Here are a few of the better ones: a)
http://www.linkadage.com, b) c) http://www.textlinkbrokers.com,
d) http://www.text-link-ads.com
. (NOTE: Only buy one/month, or you may get seriously penalized). Many times
you can purchase 1 PR7 link for a 1 month time period for, say, $150. After the
month is up, there is no need to renew because you are already in Google's
index. Paying $150, and you can be indexed by Google quickly and with little to
no work on your part.
Tip #1: Add a Google sitemap (XML). You can easily do this with free tools or
directly via a Google account. You should also check the competitor sites for
http://URLname/sitemap.xml
. It's the default for Google, and if the competition has it (it will load in
your browser or reader) - you can be assured they are pretty agressive and
informed about Search Engine Optimization techniques.
Tip #2: Discover how many pages the competition has online. You can use free
tools again, and the Xenu's Link Sleuth is free - and fast - a good tool to
keep close. The 'Stats for Managers' at the bottom of page is the important
data for statistics.
Tip #3: Use the 'link: sitename.com' syntax in Google to locate number of
backlinks within a competitor site. Google and Yahoo have different estimates
here, but it's vital information from both. (Yahoo use 'linkdomain:
sitename.com').
Much is written on the blogs' approach to SEO rankings. We believe it has its
place, but in moderation and always pertinent to your business. Blog spamming
can get you penalized as well. The Microsaw Web 2.0 blogs are here, and
recently a new service was launched at PayPerPost, written up in Business Week.
Continue the search engine optimization and search engine marketing work, and
expand your strategy to include email marketing, affiliate, on / off-page
optimization, along with traditional means for online marketing (keyword)
dominance (print/media). Always provide great content, but that alone will not
do it. Off-page strategies are very important, but may work too well. For
example, check out the top result on Google for the search term miserable
failure. It is not in position one because that web page had been optimized for
that search term. The web site is in position one because huge amounts of web
sites link to it with the text miserable failure in the link text. Can you
guess which site it is?
Enjoyed this article? Review more articles on our website:
Microsaw Search Engine Optimization
Contact author directly at jrognerud@microsaw.com
About the Author
Jon Rognerud is an ex-yahoo/overture software manager focusing on search
marketing, web development, content management systems, SEO and SEM. He is
founder of Microsaw.com, which focuses on laser-level detail within Search
Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Web Development. More on
Microsaw.com, jrognerud@microsaw.com
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