How to work out your SEO competition

So I’ve always liked the idea of just diving into a project to get the wheels turning, after all so many people over-analyse everything before getting started and end up getting nothing done. However when it comes to building a site a big factor in your success will be how well you can do in the Google results. Often webmasters will have an “ideal” keyword that they want to rank for which perfectly describes their site and is guaranteed to bring them targeted traffic, but if it’s a valuable keyword won’t there be lots of other people chasing it too? If so is it possible to work out beforehand if you can beat those sites? I realised it is possible and that some analysis can save you months of time and money by avoiding markets that are unrealistic. Even so competition analysis isn’t an exact science so here are the main things to look out for.

How many links exactly?

The number and type of links pointing to any site has a big factor in how much authority Google assigns to it, however just looking at the site’s pagerank is a serious mistake. Another mistake is to look at the total number of links (as returned by yahoo) as this doesn’t take into account links like blogroll or site wide links. For example you could have a few thousand links from only a couple of sites, which is not the same as one link from thousands of different sites. To get a real picture of the backlink profile use a service like open site explorer (www.opensiteexplorer.org) which will tell you the number of unique domains and also the anchor text ratios of your competition. OSE is great because it gives you a specific number to beat.

 

SEOmoz

Research and compare backlinks with competitors for
Keyword Analysis
Determine how challenging it is to rank for a keyword, and get a powerful analysis of your competition.

 

What type of links?

Link analysis is one of those things you can get lost in for days, it’s easy to try and analyse every link your competitor has but the truth is you can never know how much benefit they are getting from any one link. What I try to do is get an overall picture of the diversity of links they are getting, e.g. are all their links coming from forum signatures? Or maybe they’ve all been created on social bookmarking sites? Google loves diversity because when a site gets popular naturally many different types of sites link to it from all sectors of the internet. If your competition has just one type of man-made link from one part of the net then they could be easy to beat.

Quality content or just a big domain?

Often people new to seo will see a big authority name in their target market like Amazon or eBay and give up all hope. All is not lost however as frequently the amount and quality of content on these listings is poor, often Amazon just lists some manufacturer technical data and even that is mostly duplicate from somewhere else. The point I’m making is that if you can create an entire site with 100s or even 1000s of pages on a specific topic it’s a clear sign to Google that you are more relevant than just a single page (even if it is on an authority domain). Even though links are important I still believe that the amount and quality of your content has a big impact on your rankings, so if your opponent is just has one page on the subject that’s one more area you know you can beat them on.

Putting it all together

There are other factors like site age and keyword density but I don’t feel they are as useful for competition analysis as links and content. It’s important to remember that what you are looking to get is an overall picture of the difficulty of your competition, if you’re trying to isolate every possible factor you could be in danger of falling into the over-analysis trap (i.e. you never get anything done!). At a basic level I want to know that I can beat my competitors in the key areas of content and links but it doesn’t need to be volume either because as mentioned a few quality links can beat thousands that Google will ignore. It’s also important to remember that as SEOs we are all working at different levels, I can rank for things you can’t and vice versa, you have to use your own judgement when it comes to going for the market or not.

About Guest Author: Article by Paul, I hope this article helps if your thinking about taking on a new market, if you’re interested in different ways to market and earn money from your site then check out my new webmaster blog sometime.

Don’t Instagram Your Ballot

 

A not-so-surprising thing happened this morning: My Instagram feed morphed from photos of dogs, kids, fancy coffees and food porn into a stream of people’s voting ballots.

Photo courtesy of Instagram.

And it’s not only my feed: A search for “#vote” in Instagram’s Explore tab currently brings up more than 460,000 photo results. Not all of these hip pics are ballots, necessarily, but most are related to campaign and voting issues.

It’s Election Day. It’s exciting. It has been exhaustively covered, and it is completely expected that people have and will express their opinions through social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. (Update: According to brand new data from Pew Research, 22 percent of registered voters have indicated on Facebook or Twitter who they voted for.) Google’s YouTube is even encouraging voters to document their voting process.

But should you use your smartphone to photograph your ballot? Well, that all depends on where you’re voting.

According to the Citizen Media Law Project’s Web site, some states, including Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada and Texas, “expressly prohibit the use of photographic and recording equipment inside polling places.”

Photo courtesy of Instagram.

The site also offers a handy chart summarizing the laws in each state around documenting your vote.

One voter in North Carolina, where it’s illegal to take photos of completed ballots, under Statute 163 – 166.3 (sections b and c), was stripped of his smartphone when he took it out to consult his list of chosen candidates.

The state of Wisconsin is taking an even harder line, with the Government Accountability Board telling voters that posting completed ballot pics to Facebook or Twitter constitutes election fraud under the state’s law — a Class I felony. It’s also not the first time the Wisconsin GAB has warned of this.

It’s worth noting that many states prohibit activities that interfere with other people’s voting processes. So, even if photography is allowed in your polling place, disrupting or intimidating someone else, or capturing an image of their ballot, might be a big no-no.

What if you share a partial photo of your ballot that doesn’t include your candidate selection, as a Facebook friend did this morning? It’s a bit murky, but if your state prohibits ballot photography, that could arguably extend to any part of the ballot.

As tough as it is to peel yourself away from your smartphone for 10 minutes and not blast your ballot pics to your social streams, in some states, it’s wise to use caution when it comes to your vote.

 

A not-so-surprising thing happened this morning: My Instagram feed morphed from photos of dogs, kids, fancy coffees and food porn into a stream of people’s voting ballots.

(Update: According to brand new data from Pew Research, 22 percent of registered voters have indicated on Facebook or Twitter who they voted for.) Google’s YouTube is even encouraging voters to document their voting process.

The state of Wisconsin is taking an even harder line, with the Government Accountability Board telling voters that posting completed ballot pics to Facebook or Twitter constitutes election fraud under the state’s law a Class I felony.

As tough as it is to peel yourself away from your smartphone for 10 minutes and not blast your ballot pics to your social streams, in some states, it’s wise to use caution when it comes to your vote.

Internal Blogging for Companies SEO Localize information and increase “findability”

Internal Blogging for Companies

A blog is an essential tool for companies who want to effectively communicate with their
staff. A blog will:

Capture information for short and long‐term reference ‐Foster cross discipline communication of information

Localize information and increase “findability”

Decrease deficiencies found in traditional knowledge transfer Usually placed on or linked from the company intranet, the internal blog should be one of the most easily accessible points to gain internal company information.

Ideally, everyone should be able to post entries; however, to maintain a sense of decorum, it is sometimes best to allow all management to have access to post entries while
everyone else in the company should have access to post comments.

Typically easier to pitch to the execs than an external blog, internal blogs are also
substantially easier to implement with buy‐in from senior management, as the content isn’t
viewable from external sources. In addition, an internal blog is more likely to be read by
employees than a typical company intranet, newsletters, or general announcements.
So, what should be included in an internal company blog? Obviously, any company
announcements, including new products, new company directions, staff additions and
changes, awards won, events, and especially “fun” things like riddles, links to interesting
sites related to the industry – even birthdays and other announcements can be included.
Usually just a couple of posts per day are sufficient to communicate all information without
overloading your readers. Any more than that, and information can easily be missed. Space out your announcement and do a “round‐up” once a week to reiterate all important
communications and links.

It typically takes five to ten repetitions for a piece of information to reach and be
comprehended by the majority of staff, so the more vehicles there are for internal
communications initiatives, the better – and if the staff is young or technology oriented, what better way than a blog?

Making Money through Blogging

You’ve written a bunch of great blog content or perhaps you’ve written an e‐book and
you’ve been giving it away for free. You have solid traffic to your site, but you don’t want to
advertise. How do you create cash from your site?

If your blog is a success and you’ve been giving your content away, you’ve got a solid basis of authority and an existing customer base. The only thing that’s left to do is package what you already have and sell it.

Check out the self‐publishing services offered by companies like Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/). If you already have an e‐book that you’re
offering for free, you can add the option of a hard copy book for a price – or like many new
authors, organize your existing blog content into a book.

Alternately, if you prefer to stay faithful to the paperless e‐book option, you could take a cue from countless successful subject matter experts, add additional content, and charge for
an “unabridged” version, which you can sell not only through your own blog, but through multiple other niche websites as well as monsters eBay (http://www.ebay.com) and Clickbank (http://www.clickbank.com). Better yet, automate the process and create an ongoing cash stream. Once your blog has solidified you as an expert in your subject matter, with your expertise and existing traffic; it won’t be difficult to turn your work into something profitable.

SEO Content

There are numerous simple methods to make money through blogging, including Google
Adsense, affiliates, sponsorships, paid reviews, and brokering services, but before
implementing any targeted monetization systems, the first thing you need to do is make sure your blog is well‐ranked in the search engines, enabling people to actually find your site to then click on any advertisements (or
what‐have‐you) you may have implemented.
Most people use search engines to find what they’re looking for, and from those people, many
won’t look past the second page of results. There is a higher probability of someone clicking
on a link to your site if you are ranked highly within the search engines ‐ and the more hits you have, the more potential money you can make.

Although in the past, search engine optimization has most often referred to making changes in the development of your site, people are now realizing that content is absolute king. Valuable content, coupled with readability and site structure, provides the basis for
any SEO ‐friendly content. There is a fine balance between giving your audience with
compelling content and providing search engines with popular content.
Developing content with top search terms in mind (i.e.: writing for what your audience is
searching for) is the most sure‐fire way of increasing your ranking; use these additional
tips to help increase your traffic:

1. Focus on niche markets ‐ if you broaden your subject matter too much, you’ll find
yourself lost among too many results to count. Focus on particulars and frequent other
blogs in the same niche; comment on other posts leaving a link back to your blog. Instant
traffic!

2. Research popular search terms using resources like Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/),
Digg (http://digg.com/), Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends), and Technorati
(http://technorati.com/) ‐ remember; you’re not looking for keywords that you WANT
people to search; you need to find out what they’re ALREADY searching for and use those
popular terms to create new content and thus boost your ranking.

3. Make use of your Meta tags to ensure that your title, description, and keyword tags are
unique to your page’s content, and pair down unnecessary language to boost your keyword density.

4. Test your site using a Meta tag analyzer and a keyword density analyzer; there are many
free tools available to analyze your content and tags. Some search engines claim to ignore
Meta tags entirely, but frequently use the description tag to provide a page’s description in
search results. Well‐written tags are strongly recommended.

5. Use Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics) or a similar service to keep
track of where your hits are coming from, and write new posts based on popular posts
you’ve already written ‐ why reinvent the wheel when you can learn from your existing
content? Analytics will track all traffic to your site and will tell you everything you want to
know about how your visitors found your site and how they interact with it ‐ you’ll be able
to focus your content based on what’s already been proven popular and improve to convert more visitors.

6. Make use of your blog roll ‐ link to external sites as well as other posts within your own
blog; this will increase referral traffic and most search engines give more weight to pages
that are frequently linked. A very general rule is that the higher the off‐site pages rank, the
quicker the site will be crawled, and so the greater number of important sites that are
linking to YOUR site, the more often search engines like Google will crawl your site in the
future. Many well‐linked sites are crawled several times a day.