SEO Spy Tactics

Rise to the top of the SERPs

Want to get to the number one spot on Google?  Or Yahoo or MSN?  It is going to pay off if you take a good look at your top competitors.  Take the keyword that you want to target, and type it in as a search.  For an exact match, use quotes around it.

Who is the number one site (not a sponsored result, but the first actual organic listing)?

Pay close attention to their title tag, their meta description, and their keywords.  Are they using the keyword as the first part of their title tag?  Go ahead and peak at their source (in Firefox, hit CTRL+U) and look at their head tag.  How many characters are they using for the title, description, and keywords?  How many phrases?  We have already said that 25 keyword phrases is a good number to stop at.  It's better to go after a few and hit them really well than to go after too many and fail on all of them.

The odds are, the number one spot for your chosen keywords belongs to (or rather, is temporarily occupied by) someone who is using short, concise, and relevant keywords in each of these three areas.  By relevant, we mean that if you are targeting "circular saws" in your keywords list, you NEED to include that exact phrase AT LEAST once in the text content ON THAT SPECIFIC PAGE.  Otherwise it is not relevant and you'll never reach the top.  Not only do you need to use the phrase "circular saws" in your copy, but also include it generously as alt text, title attributes for outbound links (if you have links to tool suppliers this is a perfect spot to get more keyword coverage), as well as in the link text itself.

Back to the topic though, this article is about spying on your competitors to steal their number one spot in the search engines results pages.  If they are at number one, you need to closely mimic their strategy for keyword density, and then improve upon it.  Are they using the keyword in their h1 tags?  Are you?  What is the first bit of text on the page?  What is the last readable bit of text on the page?  The keywords should be there.

What else can we learn about your competitors?  Quite a bit if you use the right tools.  The next thing you will want to do is see how many other sites are linking to them.  You can do all the on-site optimization you want but if you have 10 inbound links and they have 30,000, you will need to start link building.  It will be a long road, but everyone has to start somewhere.  Go to Google and type in link:competitorsite.com and you will see how many inbound links they are getting credit for.  You are going to want to go after all of these same sites and get them to link to you as well.  And then get more. 

I am not going to cover link building techniques till later, but you should know this is going to be a large part of your efforts to reach the number one spot in the SERPs.

Another good spot to check out is Submit Express.  You can use their meta tag analyzer to grade your own site, as well as the competition.  Just enter your domain name (or the specific page you want to analyze) and let their free tool do the work.  They will give you some ideas on how to improve your relevancy and density.  You ideally want to have each tag be 100% relevant, and have a good number of keywords and description that is not too long. 

Finally, you need to see what it is about your competition that people see as valuable.  Is it more useful to visitors than your own?  If you think so, then you need to add something to your site that will wow people and keep them coming back.  Make your site sticky, add a forum, or other social aspect for users to interact with you or one another.  Add articles filled with valuable, helpful, ORIGINAL content that you can't find on other sites.  The best way to get links is by putting up content that people want to link to.

If your site is worth a link, people will link to you automatically without you having to email them.  That is what you want, right?   The least amount of effort involved, the better.

1:47 PM - 6-3-2008 - comments {0}