How to Beat your competitors - By: Sandi Belisle

You now have a website and want to be top in your marketplace. What do you do next?

Hopefully you have used some wisdom in choosing a website name which includes at least one and maybe two good keywords for your website. Since the one of the most important elements to your website is keywords along with good website optimization, if you haven't done this, not all is lost as you can still obtain the right keywords for your website and weave them carefully into it. You could pluck words from the air but you won't necessarily choose keywords that will attract visitors. You want keywords that attract visitors if you want visitors to your website. You need to know which keywords bring visitors and how many visitors a specific keyword can be expected to bring.

This calls for research. There are a couple of ways to research this. You can purchase the services of Wordtracker.com and they have a free trial version as well as the weekly, monthly and yearly fee versions. The best version to use is the weekly as you then will have a week to fine tune your keyword selection and this does take some time. Also, the weekly version gives you FULL access to all the variables necessary to conduct a solid research. The other place to do your research for internet marketing is Google anayltical which can be found at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool will give you not only the results of the keyword you input but also many suggestions for other keywords related to your subject keyword. It is good to be somewhat limiting in your choice of keyword you enter but not so limiting that you will not receive alot of suggestions. An example of this would be if you are selling an automobile and want to target buyers for your car plus you have a website for this. A suggested keyword could be: automobile sales or automobile buyers. Specific keywords would be if you had a 1995 Jeep Cherokee for sale then you would enter Jeep Cherokee buyers or sales. The problem with this is that it eliminates presenting your Jeep Cherokee to more buyers than people who be looking specifically for a Jeep Cherokee and some buyers would maybe buy this Jeep if they just knew more information about your Jeep so you eliminate other potential buyers. This is they way your thinking and attack of your subject keyword should function. But it is just one element in your keyword selection.

You then need to check the website traffic for each keyword. Personally, I prefer using the Google Tool since most of the search engine traffic is derived from Google and my goal is generally to become within the top 10 of google. In the case above involving sales, I would eliminate from the list provided by google, keywords that are extremely high in traffic as the competition is also great for those keywords so traffic of approximately 50,000 or more are not words I would choose for my project but keywords that average about 3,000 or more The perfect number actually averages between 10,000 to 20,00 but you may find that those keywords are harder to reach and you can re-structure your website later to incorporate them into your site whereas in the beginning, it is much easier to choose easier to reach top 10 and that includes long tailed keywords for your specific target. Long tailed keywords are a list of words put together that the public in general enters into the search box of a search engine to get to sites they are interested in viewing.

Next we get to the fun part of your research. Do you know who your competition is? If not, then, stepping back from your work, think about your business and what specific keyword do you think a person would search for in order to find your product or service. Go to the google search bar and enter in this specific word. You are not entering in your keywords necessarily now but maybe even the hottest or most popular keyword for your product or service. What you will receive is a list of websites which are your competition. So, now how do you compete? We need to take a look at the website's optimization and their meta tags. You want to create your own but you need to know 'what works'. You should be concerned with the first 3 websites unless you cannot access all of the site's information and if that happens, then be concerned with the first 5. Since you are 'shooting' for top 10 in google, the top sites on google are the most important to you.

Go to the first website on your list you obtained. Once you are on their home page, right click on the upper left of their website. You should see a popup appear which gives you choices and you will then click on 'view source'. This may look very confusing if you have never done this before, but you only need to concern yourself of the information between the and the area. This is where the meta tags for search engines are located. Whenever a search engine goes to a website, it is the first information that is read by it's spider. The most important information is the Title and the Description. The keyword meta tag is no longer as important as it once was with google however, alot of the smaller search engines still use them so they are a good thing to also have on your site. Make a hard (paper) copy of the subject websites so you can compare what they are using and what is working for them. This helps give you your final anaylsis for choosing the right keywords. It will also show you information regarding selecting the right title and description. You can improve on what they are using by following some simple facts which are that titles should contain no more than 68 characters (count spaces too), descriptions should be no longer than 158 characters, there should be no words such as the, of, and, etc. in your title and description. If you put unusual characters in this area, it can cause a split of the information towards your count by the search engines so try not to do so unless you have chosen two or more specific keywords that are totally unrelated to each other. It is best not to re-use your words in the title itself. Make it count for you. You can incorporate 2 or 3 keyword phrases into one in your title therefore making them important to your site. Always keep in mind that the first words expressed in either the title or description, tell the search engine spiders that these words are the most important keywords for your site so make sure you write them that way. This fact also applies to content within the site. The one problem you will encounter is when you are writing to become search engine friendly, you are not becoming necessarily visitor friendly. It is best to overcome this within your content somewhat but they are not harmonious situations for a site which wants top 10 on google quickly and relatively fast.

There are more issues to beating your competitors but we can only deal with the most important here and these things will have the biggest impact. You must also realize that an important fact to your competitors site which causes them to have their position is their backlinks which are links on other relevant sites which point to their website. To make this a simple process for you, find out what they have by going to the website of linkpopularity.com and checking to see how many links point to their site. Check out all three search engines; google, yahoo and MSN. The nice thing about this website is that they also give the URL (website address) of the site that links to these websites. If you read them, you can approach many of them to place a link on their site to your site. Make sure you have looked at their website and you are very respectful and complimentary in your request. Say something nice about their website. By this time you have your proper title and description to use to give them.

There are two other things you should do to reach top in your industry fairly quickly. One is to establish a link trading system with 'like' sites. Most of the time choose complementary sites to your site however, sites which incorporate your 'anchor' (title) text on their site too are the most effective, however if a site has an overall google ranking of 4/10 or more, you may choose to trade links anyway as this can affect your google 'count' and help you. Evaluate each one thoroughly before agreeing to trade links. Since you need ALOT of links to catch up with your competitors, you might decide to adopt a different theory on trading links in the beginning. Use a simple link trading software that HELPS you get more links and helps you shorten the time to place them on your site. You can find systems at http://www.internetmarketingservicessite.com.

The next thing you can do to find websites that might interest you or your site will interest them is to join a couple of websites which offer the service of helping websites find each other and the best I have found are linkmarket.net, link2me.com and linkmetro.com

The final step in getting above your competitors is to join IBP which again you will find at internetmarketingservicessite.com. Just click on the links there and you can receive trial subscriptions, etc. to help you get done what you need to. There are more optimization tips and tricks but the basics here should see you at the top 10 on google.

About the Author

Owning a website which beats competitors takes some work and a little bit of time but with a little research is not un-reachable. Using various tactics can easily beat the competition on some keywords and in time, all of their keywords but you need

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