Ok, Is everyone ready for the steps of analysis?
Lets get started. The first thing we need to do is choose a site that is in the top 10 of google for the keywords or phrases that we might want to target. We start with the top level keyword to check this keyword or phrase. The reason we always start at the top level is that many people are scared of top levels because of the amount of links they have or the PR of the page that is high ranking in the serps.
Lets cover PR first since it is very popular. Pr is determined by how competetive the market or keyword or phrase is and how many sites are competeting for the term, and how many links the top sites have, and what format the links are in. Let me give you an example. A PR 3 site for the term "dallas Texas Real Estate" has 40 Back links in Google, 2681 in MSN and 481 in Yahoo. the url is
www.keystomoving.com (it was on page 3 or 4). The term "Mexia Texas Real Estate" for
www.lakelimestone.com has google 3 links, MSN 65 links and Yahoo has 164 links! and it was the # 1 site. Both are PR 3 sites with completely different amounts of links and totaly different rankings in the search engines. Dallas has a much more competetive market than Mexia has. Mexia has 150 searches per month on overture and about 113,000 sites competing for this term. Dallas has about 18,000 searches on overture per month and there are
30,600,000 sites competing for this phrase.
Are you starting to get the idea?
Next is links. The first thing about links is that not all links are created equal. I am going to give you a few very thought provoking examples to prove this. Go to google and type "click here" in the search bar and the adobe site comes up # 1 in the results. Why does it rank for this? The phrase click here does not appear on the page in the content or the source code. Now type in the word "failure" and George Bush's Bio page comes up # 1 in the results
yet this word is not in the content or the code either! The reason this happened is because of the structure of the links pointing to these pages. The clickable text is called anchor text. This is the text with the link embedded in it and this is THE MAJOR factor that causes you to rank for a term.
JUST A FEW HINTS
You can check backlinks by typing in link:www.yourcompetetion.com in the search bar of the engine you want to check backlinks on.
I always pick the site from Google and base the amount of links on YAHOOs back links because Google only shows back links from pages with a PR of 3 or higher. So the rule is to pick the site by Google and the analysis and amount of links from Yahoo
Have you ever been to a site that had a PDF file that you could download? They always tell you it is a PDF and that if you do not have the adobe reader that you can download it free. Just CLICK HERE . Go ahead, click on it! I just voted for the adobe site as the authority on the term click here .
The reason I went over all of this is because your competetion can have 10,000 links and you just might be able to beat them for a specific phrase with only 1,000 links if they do not have the proper anchor text. This is the most important aspect of seo.
Now, you find a site for a keyword or phrase that you want to beat and check their back links. Go to 50 of the links and see what the clickable text is on their links to get an average of what their anchor text is, Or you could invest a little money as I have done and you can have software that does this for you. There are plenty of programs on the market ranging from $49.00 to several thousand that will do this for you. I did not spend thousands and this is what I do for a living. I would never spend over 200 myself. But these tools are worth their weight in gold as far as time is concerned. But most of you only have 1 or 2 sites and you can check all of this without these tools.
Once you determine how many links they have with your anchor text then you can decide if you want to target this phrase. You should try to figure an additional 20 % for the total amount of links you will need to beat the target site. If you suspect that you can not get an accurate figure(anchor text is varying to much) then you can go to 100 of 200 to find out a better average. Here is a hint, Most sites have their URL or their company name as their anchor text. So it is fairly simple to beat most sites for a "ninche" market.
Ok, Now some of you have another question, Why do they still rank for a term if their anchor text is wrong?
The answer is that they have their keywords in the content or the title or <h1> tags. Or they may have all 3 or even alt tags with their keywords or phrases and their PR is high from 10,000 links.
Basically they are shooting a shotgun blast and we want to take a rifle shot! We want the straight path and want to hit the target right on the center. We do not want to shoot in a general direction and take the chance of missing the mark.
Now, you have to check several keywords or phrases and do analysis on site in the top 10 from each phrase to get to a reasonable target for your first target keyword or phrase
If the phrase has under 10,000 searches per month then you just need to bite the bullet and step up to the next relevent phrase. Anything less than 10,000 searches per month is pretty much a waste of time unless you are a realtor and selling million dollar homes!
Now you understand how to do analysis on you competitions websites and the basics of choosing the proper keywords. We will start on the on-page work within 48 hours. If you have somethig you do not understand, Please let me know and I will get you the answer!
Jim Corkern