Evaluating competition

[Cryp]

Hey people

Alot of marketers are spooked by say 11million competing sites, but if the number 1 on google is weak, the niche can be dominated. Thus as I see it, if you can determine accurately the strenght of the competing site vs to what extent you should search engine optimize you would be well on your way

So my question is, what should the primary indicator be when evaluating competing sites? Page rank, alexa rank, high PR links?

[Linda Buquet]

Evaluate overall SEO, both on-page and off-page - especially the number of back links.

Also do a Google search like this: allintitle: "key phrase in quotes"

A raw search may bring up 11 million competing but most of those may not even be strong competition at all, just happen to have the keywords somewhere on the page. Using allintitle, as above, only shows the pages that are serious competition and have the exact keywords in the title tag. If that number is reasonable, then evaluate what the top 10 are doing and how many back links they have and then try to outdo them.

[Clintoc]

PR of the sites can give you a pretty good gauge. You should also note the number of backlinks to the site.

11 million isn't too intimidating, most of those aren't actually optimizing for what you want anyways. I have a site that is now ranked 29 out of 18 million. And I created a blog that my fiancee posts on at least once daily that ranks 9 (and 10) out of 75 million (haven't started to monetize that blog yet.)

Once you know what the competition is doing, just do more.

[Cryp]

Thx Linda and Clint - the overall feel is getting backlinks, how do I check the number of backlinks btw? Also how important is getting a keyword in your url for seo purposes?

[Linda Buquet]

Most people recommend using Yahoo for backlink checks as Google often does not report them all.
Type: link:domainname.com in Yahoo searchbar.

Having the keyword in the URL does help quite a bit. If it's not in the domain then try to get it in the page name like yourdomain.com/keywords.html