How To Destroy The Competition Using SEO (in 3 easy steps).
Search Engine Optimization and Search Marketing Secrets Revealed.
(This article is for folks that are new to the search optimization business, or early stages of building web sites, or if you have been around for a while, but gotten off track, or you are well into the successful web site marketing business and still looking for ideas).
Competitor: com·pet·i·tor
Pronunciation: k&m-'pe-t&-t&r
Function: noun
: one that competes : as a : RIVAL b : one selling or buying goods or services in the same market as another c : an organism that lives in competition with another. (from m-w.com)
It even describes competition down to the biological level - anything living and co-existing since the birth of living creatures!
Here at Microsaw.NET, we focus on the web marketplace (search engine optimization, search engine marketing, information architecture, web design, application development), and how people find us or compete with us. Increasingly, web surfers are using search engines to find companies, services and goods. Traditional means of marketing (print/media, tv, radio) is getting escalated traffic and focus from search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN are the top three), and the big media companies, and other smaller ones are coming up with innovative ways to beat out their competition. On the Internet, "The Web", we are dealing with virtual entities - but we all compete in increasingly tougher and more intelligent user market places. It's is a very crowded and competitive place.
Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are two fantastic ways in which you can get visibility on the Internet - one quicker than the other. Other options exist, including creating new user mailing lists or expanding existing mailing lists, and looking at smarter ways to deal with the company's direct marketing campaigns. You can increase visibility and competitive edge as much as a 1,000%, depending on list size, angle of attack, copy writing techniques and your overall marketing strategy.
You should also leverage Affiliate Marketing Programs - by either joining and promoting such, or creating one yourself, with potentially exciting and lucrative results. Simply put, the merchants offer affiliates commissions for sales activity generated by the affiliate's web sites. In fact, the the biggest players, are using techniques like this within the Fortune 500 arena and beyond. They count on Affiliates to get the word out about their products services or just the latest company developments and news. It's actually easy to do, and the model is simple: "I give you $10 dollars, then I take $5 back, doing this many, many times over".
One easy and fast way, Adsense - is in essence a sophisticated affiliate online program - and we show you how that's done via our complimentary Adsense Training Videos. However, without search engine marketing and search engine optimization, you are missing out on other huge opportunities for smashing the competition and making large sums online.Now, back to topic. Let's think about a business niche - and yes - if you didn't know how to create success on the Internet using these silent money making engines, you need to understand that niche marketplaces is how you get there. Sure, you could compete for the keyword "Sony" - but the year would be 2015, and you'd wake up poor, stupid and mad insisting perhaps still that your stubborn ways would work. They don't, so don't be stupid.
For more information, please take a look at our other search related articles, and how you might learn the SEO Concepts, researching the competition, linking strategies and relevancy discussions, proper SEO compliant HTML coding, and use of powerful and free search engine optimization tools and techniques.
Optimization Tip #1: On page and off page optimization, what is that, and why is it important?
First of all you need to create a web site that is a related to a niche marketplace. It is very important that you do your keyword research first. In fact to competitive research as an action step is missed by over 98% of the online marketplace. There are many great keyword tools and many are free. Keep in mind that Google 'owns' over 50% of the search marketplace. (Yahoo receives about 30% and MSN about 20%). Google is a very important search engine for you to focus on, and I suggest you start with it (even though I am a MSN and Yahoo fan as well, specially the new MSN Adcenter).
When you start researching keywords do not start with the obvious. For example, if you are selling Canon products, do no start optimizing for the word Canon. You need to break it down to Canon power shot, digital cameras. Or, even better - Canon power shot SD400, memory sticks. This way, you have created a niche marketplace within a larger category, and you will able to optimize keywords for this specific area. With this in mind, go to Google and start typing in specific keywords and phrases to see where the competition is at. As you are doing this, you should understand the page rank algorithm. It is Google's way of giving specific value to how popular are popular your web site is. It's essentially based on the number of votes of other web sites that have cast votes up for your web site. Votes are generated when another web site places a link on their web site that is pointing to your web site. The more votes you get, the better your chances are for good ranking.
To see the page rank, you need to install the Google toolbar, and it is free at http://toolbar.google.com.Now as you look at the competition you must understand that we talk about on page and off page off optimization. The on page optimization are things like H1 header tags, whether they're using main keywords in the title tags of whether or not keywords and phrases are bolded underlined or italicized, whether they're using image tags and placing the strategic keywords within that tag. We also should note if the competition has placed the keyword once at the very beginning of the copy, and once at the very end of the copy it sort of follows an hour glaze glass type of a model. Keywords at the top, less in the middle and again repeated at the end. Do the things that the competition is doing just do it a little bit better - this is one way to get one step ahead of them. Simple.
Tools: www.pixelfast.com/overture (a custom URL using Overture's (Yahoo) Bid Tool.
Optimization Tip #2: How does Tagging really work, and why does it matter?
Once you open out your Canon cash (!) landing page you need to start with the page title for your web site. That page title should only include the mean keywords are typically would have three sections in the keyword header in the title tag rather, and it would contain your most important. The less important in the least important and so three out items in your top title header. Do not ever say welcome to our web site! Try to combine the keywords in your title.Make sure you use the H1 header tag. It's a very important one, in fact, and when Google reads web page use the text from the top left-hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page and Google was established at Stanford by Brin and Page. And they are using a very a thesis-based-white-paper model for how content is displayed and text is retrieved. And if you think in terms of the thesis paper, and how it's laid out, this would form a good model for you to duplicate.
Next, you would need to create a H2 header tags. You can think of that is the sub heading for a web page. This is a very common used tag, so it's best to place the primary keyword in your H1 tags and your secondary keywords into your H2 tags. Then you need to actually create the content for the page. When you try to write the contents, sprinkle your main keywords throughout the copy. But don't overdo and make it a natural effort.Once you have written the copy you should then go back and bold underline or italicize some of the keywords. Only one time each, maximum. There are many HTML site building tools out there that use the Bold (B) tag for bolding keywords, and has been overused. Google doesn't penalize you for it, but in fact, by using the tag STRONG it provides higher quality content when done right.You can also add some images for your users, and when you do this you need to properly include the keyworded image tags. So for example, if we have an image on our web page called 'oneshot.jpg' you would include code that adds that ALT tag and text about that specific memory stick (from our Sony example).
Also, Google views your web page from top left to bottom right. Well, in general they do. However, you want to make sure that you code your HTML to compliment or support this, specially if you have non-related navigational elements to the left of page. There are techniques to do this, which will be explained in our SEO Free Email Course.
This lesson has covered on page optimization techniques, and it is a great way to optimize your page, but it will not ultimately have a dramatic effect in your ranking. Off page optimization, however, we'll get you high rankings, and it is a key point to your success. We will cover that next.
Optimization Tip #3 : Off page search engine optimization - the final few methods for nailing the competition to the ground.
This is a very important last step, and you'll make sure you that nailed the competition. You have come up with your niche marketplace and associated keywords and phrases. You will have completed proper approach to tagging from titles through the body content, including H2's and ALT tags. You are then ready to get who will your site indexed. Youe first rule, is to never use the Google submission form. There are better and faster ways.
The first way is you need to know how a search engines find you in the first place. They will visit one web site that is already in their index and if they follow the link to that new site to our the next site. So for example, if you have a new site and you have a partner in this sold in the Canon space, and he puts a link on your page and he's already visible on the Internet at Google. Well crawl to that site to find a link back to you, and then locate your site and get you into the index. Now what if you don't have a partner in this space in your are brand new hot, you still than get into the index. While there are great articles on your topic(s), there were article directories that you can submit to, including PR Web. Examples are: goarticles.com, buzz article.com, article fever.com and many more. These are great places for you to write something about your news program or marketplace. The engines will pick you out. Rest assured, Google will find you.
The second way to quickly get listed in the Google index is to go to your competition. Type in the search terms you are competing with and find web sites that have a page rank of five or six or higher that you will notice to the green bar from the Google toolbar. Find six or 10 of these sites and find their content information. We have found that e-mail can work, but that calling by picking up the phone and acting professionally and commenting on their site and how best links could support each other. Higher ranking sites may ignore you, and it's certainly tougher persuade somebody to add your link to their web sites. You must give them a good reason to do this. So context sites that are really related and complimentary are the best. Find good and great link neighborhoods within your topics. And always think of a way that you can give them something out that they would benefit from. Think of this as an emotional bank account. You make at deposits, and they make withdrawals. If you can manage to get at least one PR 6 web site to link your web site, you'll be off and running! You should be indexed in under three days. If you get a PR 7 web site link to you - in most cases you'll be there in under 24 hours. But that persuading the higher page rank sites can sometimes be tricky, and then there are way other ways to do this.
The third way is to purchase links from high Page Rank websites. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to visit one of the many link purchasing websites. Here are a few of the better ones: (NOTE: Only buy one/month, or you may get seriously penalized) http://www.linkadage.com, http://www.textlinkbrokers.com, http://www.text-link-ads.com. Many times you can purchase 1 PR7 link for a 1 month time period for, say, $150. After the month is up, there is no need to renew because you are already in Google's index! So, basically by paying $150 you can be indexed by Google within 24 hours, with little to no work on your part.
Also, much is written on the blogs approach to SEO rankings. We believe it has its place, but in moderation and always pertinent to your business. Blog spamming can get you penalized as well. You can check out our Web 2.0 blogs here, and recently a new service was launched at PayPerPost, written up in Business Week.
Continue your excellent search engine optimization and search engine marketing work, and expand your strategy to include email marketing, affiliate, off-page and traditional means for online marketing (keyword) dominance. Always provide great content, but don't think that alone will do it. Offpage strategies work very well, in fact too well in certain cases. The top result on Google for the search term miserable failure is not on position one because the web page had been optimized for that search term. The web site is on position one because very many web sites link to that web site with the text miserable failure in the link text.
