Good Morning Friends!
It is a GREAT day to be alive! I hope you are all "Well and prospering"
If you carefully read this post, I believe you will be better armed for your SEO efforts. Let me also point out a fact that I know you are aware of, but I don't want to seem cold and insensitive. Your competitors are NOT your enemy, however if you don't approach your SEO this way, you are going to die on the SEO battlefield.
If I have not mentioned beforehand, Please Subscribe to me, and please join the group GreatSEO if you have not done so. All my tips are completely free for the purpose of helping you get better SEO placement.
Having been in the military during the 70's and 80's I was constantly in training for the purpose of "knowing your enemy". I thank God that I never had to go fight in a war, but if ever I had to, I would have gone well prepared.
The only difference with SEO, is you don't physically die if you lose a battle (you just may wish you had)..
The purposes of my posts are to help you to prepare a "Battle Plan" for your SEO efforts.. every day on the SEO battlefield, you will need to know your enemy, what tactics they will use, what weapons they use, and what weapons you will need in your arsenal. I am going to discuss building a battle plan that works.. This has been tested TIME and TIME again, I know it works.. If you spend enough time reading my posts, you will discover one thing. My approach to SEO is the same as a carpenter.. MEASURE 20 TIMES - CUT ONCE! Any other approach is going to get you into trouble, and cost you wasted time and money.
Every SEO project I embark on, I ask myself three questions..
- Are you able to win this battle?
- What will be the cost?
- Will this be one battle, or several small ones?
Let me show you how I answer all the above questions.. This is SO simple. This is the stuff that will separate you from the meek, and it will also separate your competitors from the top positions in Google.
You have heard it said that a picture is better than a thousand words... Here is your picture for success!
Ok, the picture above tells the whole story.. I spend most of my day looking at screens very similar the the picture above. I had a conversation yesterday with a friend who also does SEO in another area of the country. He asked me, what software do you use.. I answered Internet Explorer, and Firefox.. He excitedly said "WHAT" I responded, "I use Internet Explorer and Firefox" Here is my strategy for determining my battle plan.. This is short and sweet.. Let me note that the first step is researching their target keywords. I will not discuss that part now, but will go DEEP into the keyword research process in a later post. This post is to help you develop a systematic "Battle Plan".
- I open the prospective customer's page in Internet Explorer
- I then click "View Source"
- I look at their "Title, Meta Keywords, and Meta Description" to make sure they are correct.
- I then open Firefox (With SEO Quake Plug-in Installed in it) and I do a search for their keywords.
- The results tell me everything I need to know to either go for it, or run for the hills..
Ok, if you don't have Firefox, go to www.mozilla.org and download it. Your system may need to restart after the installation.
Now, go into Firefox and navigate to www.seoquake.com and download the SEO Quake plugin.
Now when you go to Google.com and do a search for your target keywords, you will get all the info you need to know about how to overcome (or if you can't overcome) your competitors. Let me state that this is a real quick indicator of the weaknesses and strengths of your competitors. Seo Quake will tell you the following vitals about your competitition.
- Their PR
- Google Indexed Pages
- SEMRUSH Links and LinkDomain (I don't worry about these)
- Bing Index
- Alexa Rank
- Age of their domain
- If they do or do not have a SiteMap
- Other info that I don't worry about
Next I check to see if they are in Yahoo or Dmoz directories (I don't typically worry about these as they are expensive)..
Ok, the items above (Especially 1,2,5,7) are things I will have to work on to overcome the comps..
You can (and I have many times overcome them without all the factors) just needed better SEO techniques.
You can do NOTHING about Age of your competitors domains, but Great SEO practices will overcome even that..
If the Keywords you are going after seem unsurmountable, find some good Long Tail Keywords and go for them first. Get visible for the long tails and then go after more searched keywords like Sell Your House.
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