Great, so “cat pictures” gets a lot of searches, but will it be very easy or
very difficult to rank for? That’s step #2 for me–analyzing the competition
for the search terms I want to target. I do this by going to the search
engines and checking the results for the keywords.
I tend to focus on Yahoo first, MSN second, and never really focus on Google
because it takes months to rank for anything in Google. Frankly I’d rather
focus my efforts on the two search engines that are responsible for 45% of
search traffic (Yahoo and MSN) than focus all of my efforts on Google (a
common mistake). Google only gets 30% of search traffic, and it takes
anywhere from 6 months to a year to rank in Google. I always get ranked in
Yahoo and MSN much faster.
So if Google eventually ranks me well due to my efforts with Yahoo and
MSN, fine, if not, whatever.
If you’ll recall from the Triple Your AdSense CTR tutorial, Yahoo and MSN
visitors give much better click through rates on AdSense and YPN ads anyway, so ranking in those engines will be healthier for your bottom line.
Ok, let’s take Yahoo’s results for “cat pictures” and do a little competition
analysis.
The first thing I noticed is that of the top 10 results, 3 had almost nothing to
do with cat pictures at all. There was a site in there about cat health and cat care, and a cat ezine, etc. That’s a sign that it will be pretty easy to
rank for the keywords, because if 3 of the top 10 are ranking for keywords
that they obviously are not optimizing for, if I focus my attention and
efforts on optimization for the keywords, it’s quite likely I’ll succeed.
Also, of the top 10 results, only 3 had the exact phrase “cat pictures” in the
title. Having the exact phrase in the title (and especially having the
exact phrase BE the title) is a powerful SEO technique, so if only a few
of the results have the exact phrase in the title, that’s another sign that
competition is light.
Finally, I check the number of in-bound links for the top 3 results. That’s
easy to do. Just do a search for “link:http://www.therankingpage.com/”.
At first glance it might look like it’s going to be really difficult to rank for “cat
pictures”. I mean, it would take a lot of time and hard work to get 8,000+
in-bound links to compete with about.com’s cat pictures page. And we all
know that links are what really matter, right?
Ok, it’s time to dispell a few myths about in-bound links here.
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