SEO Rankings: How to Outrank Your Competitors in the Search Engines

Getting free traffic to your website is better than continuously paying each time someone clicks on your ad in Google Adwords. In order to get free web traffic your site needs to at least appear on the first page of Google and/or other Bing and Yahoo. Ideally your site needs to appear within the top 5 listings so a person doesn’t need to scroll down to see the other results.

The biggest problem with getting high rankings in the search engines is how to outrank competing websites. If you are in a popular niche you’re probably competing with 1000s or millions of similar sites.

How to outrank your competitors in the search engines

1. Create a list of the top 10 websites

Enter your main keyword phrase into the Google search box and create a list of the top 10 websites containing that keyword. Repeat the process for other keyword phrases you want your web pages to rank for.

2. Analyze your competitors’ websites

I use Market Samurai to analyze the top 10 ranked websites for a specific keyword. This software saves you are ton of time and allows you to export the results in a csv file for easy viewing. All you have to do is enter your main keyword in the software and it will automatically analyze the top sites for that particular keyword within a few minutes.

Download your free copy of Market Samurai at:
http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/vision2010

Here is the list of factors Market Sumuari analyzes for the top 10 competing sites:

Domain age
Pagerank
Google index account
Referring domains
Page backlinks
Domain backlinks
Page .edu/.gov backlinks
DMOZ directory
Yahoo Directory
Keyword in title”Keyword in URL
Keyword in description
Keyword in header tag
Google cache age

Domain age
Old domain names rank better than new ones because search engines see that they are not “fly by night” domains meaning they weren’t registered for a temporary time. Older domains tend to be more trusted than new ones.

Pagerank
This determines the overall quality and quantity of links to a website. The higher the number the better the page rank.

Google index account
The number of pages on this domain indexed by Google

Referring domains
The total number of unique domains with backlinks pointing to a specific URL

Page backlinks
The total number of unique backlinks pointing to a specific URL (not including the links within the website)

Domain backlinks
The total number of external links pointing to any page on that domain, including deeply nested pages (not including links from the website itself)

Page .edu/.gov backlinks
The total number of external links pointing to the website from Government (.gov) and Educational (.edu) resources.

DMOZ directory
If the site is listed in the DMOZ directory ( the only free most popular directory on the web)

Yahoo Directory
If the site is listed in the Yahoo directory ($299.00/year)

Keyword in title
Whether your main keyword appears in the title meta tag

Keyword in URL
Whether your main keyword appears in the URL of your website

Keyword in description
Whether your main keyword appears in the description meta tag

Keyword in header tag
Whether your main keyword appears h1,h2,h3 tags of your web page content.

Google cache age
The number of days since Google last indexed your web page

2. Analyze backlinks of your competitors

Getting Incoming links (also known as backlinks) to your website is critical to obtaining high rankings. The quantity and quality of backlinks determines its rankings. After you’ve optimized your site begin a link building campaign.

To outperform competitors your site needs to have more links pointing to it from other sites (incoming links) that contain your main keywords. For example if Site X has 100 incoming links you’ll need more than 100 links to outrank them.

Create a list of websites that link to your competitors. Use the free backlink tool from Yahoo Explorer to find them. It won’t show every backlink but will display the main ones.

3. Get backlinks from competing sites

Websites that link to your competitors may include directories, forums and blogs. Visit each of these sites to build backlinks to your own website. This will save you time trying to find them yourself. Make sure the content relates to your site before adding the link.

4. Add unique content

The more content you add to your website the greater potential for higher rankings because each optimized page provides another entry point for visitors to enter your site. Each time you add a new web page make sure you build incoming links to it from pages within your site as well as backlinks from other websites.

If you follow the steps above you’ll outrank your competitors. This may require some patience particularly if you’re in a popular niche. Also your new rankings only appear when the search engines have re-indexed your pages.