| Top
Web News |
Opera
Wants Users To Get Widgety
Opera Widgetize attempts to encourage more of its browser users to create little
applications, or widgets, with a few mouse clicks instead of lengthy coding sessions.
Time
Compares Apples To Goodmail
If a fish salesman's brother tells you his brother's fish is the best in town,
do you take his word for it? Or would you think it, um, fishy? So when AOL's brother
releases a report that use of Goodmail's Certified Email resulted in a 30% increase
in response, shouldn't we subject it to the same scrutiny?
StumbleUpon
Smiles Upon IE Users
If you don't use Firefox, then you probably haven't seen StumbleUpon, a toolbar
that "helps you discover great websites." That's because it was only available
for Firefox - until now. StumbleUpon has begun offering a version compatible with
Internet Explorer.
Sonasoft
Experiences Record Growth
Business is booming for Sonasoft, a San Jose-based company specializing in backup,
recovery, and replication software. According to the latest press release, both
revenue and customer installations grew by 200 percent in the first half of 2006.
National
Geographic Shows Musical Inclination
When you think of online music stores, what do comes to mind? iTunes? Napster?
How about National Geographic? That's right - the company known for their focus
on animals, landscapes, and remote tribes is getting into the music business.
ApartmentRatings
Moves To Google Calendar
A couple of new features at ApartmentRatings.com use one of Google's newer services
to help people plan their moves.
AIM
Pro Business IM Debuts
AOL and web conferencing firm WebEx have partnered on the new AIM Pro client,
a newly released project that AOL believes will make them ready to capitalize
on a $1.1 billion enterprise messaging market.
Yahoo,
Zillow Peek Into Homes
Instead of wondering just how much the neighbors paid for the house across the
street, Yahoo provides an easier way to search for home values with the help of
Zillow.
Inbound
Link Quality Declared #1 In SEO
For Google, it's not about how many people you know or how many people seem to
like you. It's about, mostly, who points to you and says "there's a person
worth visiting." Fortune Interactive's reverse engineering to decode how search
algorithms work suggests that one weighty somebody...
|
|
|
07.20.06
Demystifying Your Competitor's Ranking Successes
 By
Ross Dunn
We have all been there, "how the heck do they always get #1?" It is a constant
frustration for many a client and, well, even myself occasionally.
The fact is that much of the time there are a few solid reasons behind the search
engine success of any website and it is important to learn what these reasons
are before trying to compete. How is this done? Therein lies the subject of this
article; how do you determine what your competitor has done to win the search
engine war?
Demystifying your competitor's success requires you to put on your detective garb
because you are going to have to investigate all aspects of their website; even
the deepest darkest corners. In the following instructional I will lead you through
a hypothetical investigation of a competitor who is ranking for the phrase "voip
services". In each step I will choose the more popular result that I find when
I do similar competitor analyses professionally. So please take note, the sample
is only the most popular result; occasionally there are truly baffling cases of
competitor success which have required heftier investigation leading to differing
conclusions of what they did to succeed.
STEP 1: Start with the Basics: Is The Site Optimized?
Visit your competitor's website and look at the content on the page. Does the
keyphrase they are ranking under appear often throughout the body text? Does the
phrase appear in the headings, Meta Tags, Title and in their menu? If this is
so it generally means they have focused completely on attaining the keyphrase
they are ranking highly for. In other words it is quite possible, and even likely,
that they have sacrificed other keyword goals in order to achieve this single
goal.
Example Results of Step 1:" The competitor's page has utilized the ‘voip
services' often but not in a spammy manner (not obvious overuse) throughout the
body text on their home page. The page topic is clearly focused on this phrase
because the Title tag states ‘VOIP Services - by VOIP Business Systems' and the
headings and menu items are clearly related. Conclusion, I have no doubt that
this site has focused on this phrase and that a search engine spider will have
no problem logically identifying the subject of this page as ‘voip services'."
STEP 2: Is Site Structure Playing A Role In Their Success?
Site structure is a fundamental reason for search engine success. I cannot stress
enough just how important it is to have a website that can be freely and simply
indexed by search engines. The fact is that the more legitimate and useful content
that a search engine has access to on a website the better the environment for
top rankings. To put this inquiry simply: "how well is the website indexed?" Each
search engine may react slightly different to the technology used within a website
so let's tackle the 2 largest and most revealing engines:
Test Google and Yahoo: On each search engine use the following syntax
replacing "competitor" with your competitor's site: site:www.competitor.com .
This search will reveal how many pages that each major engine has indexed within
the competitor's site. Now that you have a list of the pages indexed, look and
see if each indexed page has its own title and description. The answer will determine
whether each page within their site has been individually optimized.
It is also crucial to look at the URL's for each link. Does each link appear to
have many symbols such as "%&"? Often a website with a lot of extraneous code
in their URL's will not be 100% indexed because the search engines tend to shy
away from pages that are created dynamically (by databases - which these characters
state). If there are no extraneous characters it may be quite revealing if you
know the site is far too big to be anything but driven by a database. In this
situation it is apparent that the competitor's website has been tweaked by a programmer
to allow the search engines to index everything. This tweak is extremely common
and highly recommended for anyone who has a database driven website with unfriendly
URLs (contact me for more
info).
Google Sitemap
Another useful and revealing tactic is to determine whether your competitor is
using Google Sitemap to improve the indexing of its website. To find this out
with reasonable chances of success, try entering the following URL into your browser's
address bar: www.competitor.com/sitemap.xml. This is the default file name for
Google sitemaps so if your competitor has one this will often provide you with
a resulting page full of xml data. Here
is an example of what you would see if your search were successful (from StepForth's
website). If you do find a sitemap then it is reasonable to assume that your competitor
is relatively well informed on the latest search engine tactics and that Google
Sitemaps may play a small role in their online success.
Comparing Actual Site Size
Finally you need to know exactly how many pages your competitor actually has online.
This way you can determine how well their website has been indexed. To do this
there are a variety of software options but one simple and free option is to use
Xenu's Link
Sleuth. Xenu is a free site analysis tool available here; in the past I have
found it very simple, small to install and unobtrusive. Install the program and
select a new project where you just need to enter the address to spider and let
it go to work. Ultimately you can ignore a lot of the information because you
are not trying fix dead links. The key is the "Statistics for Managers" section
located at the bottom of the report. The number of pages within the site can be
found next to the "text/html" statistic.
Read
the Full Article
About the Author:
Article by Ross Dunn, CEO of StepForth Search
Engine Placement Inc. |
