Page 22 - index

How To Win SThere’s a wealth of traffc to be won by
earch marketing is a competitive game.

outcompeting just one of 10 sites ranking for
a particular keyword. And it’s this effort to
Top Google outcompete one of the 10 that separates those

with top 10 rankings and those without.

To get your share of top search engine
Rankings rankings you don’t need to be the biggest and
you don’t need to be the best. You only need
to be a little better than the weakest site in the
top 10.

It should be the job of every site owner, or
their SEO consultant, to not only identify the
weakest of the top 10 ranking sites, but also
to identify the key metrics to monitor and to
understand how to use what you discover to
your own beneft.

Monitoring competitors is a necessary and
well-established business strategy practiced
across virtually every industry, both offine and
on. You need to know what your competition
is doing in order to do it better, faster and
more proftably. If your goal is to rank within
the top fve for a popular keyword phrase you
will have more success if you study how the
currently ranked top fve sites got there, and
what they’re doing to stay there. Only then will
you really understand what you have to do to
break into that group.

Researching your competitors’ page
optimization, site structure, internal linking
methods, keyword targeting, marketing
strategy, current rankings, inbound link volume
and quality as well as the rate at which they
acquire new links are all essential aspects of
adult SEO. In this month’s Payout column I’m
going to outline many of the specifc metrics
and strategies that you should be keeping
an eye on in order to keep pace with your
competitors.

where They Get Their Links

Knowing exactly where they get their links
can help you to follow their same ranking path
by working to get links from the same -- or
similar -- sources. Knowing where they get
their links can also help you to discover new
categories of link sources and can give you new
ideas of other creative avenues of acquiring
links.

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