Saturday 17 January 2009

Analyze the Competition Adsense SEO

Great, so “cat pictures” gets a lot of searches, but will it be very easy or very difficult to rank for? That’s step #2 for me–analyzing the competition for the search terms I want to target. I do this by going to the search engines and checking the results for the keywords. I tend to focus on Yahoo first, MSN second, and never really focus on Google because it takes months to rank for anything in Google. Frankly I’d rather focus my efforts on the two search engines that are responsible for 45% of search traffic (Yahoo and MSN) than focus all of my efforts on Google (a common mistake). Google only gets 30% of search traffic, and it takes anywhere from 6 months to a year to rank in Google. I always get ranked in Yahoo and MSN much faster. So if Google eventually ranks me well due to my efforts with Yahoo and MSN, fine, if not, whatever. If you’ll recall from the Triple Your AdSense CTR ebook (which you need to get from AdSenseGold.com and read if you haven’t already), Yahoo and MSN visitors give much better click through rates on AdSense and YPN ads anyway, so ranking in those engines will be healthier for your bottom line.


Ok, let’s take Yahoo’s results for “cat pictures” and do a little competition
analysis.
That’s a sign that it will be pretty easy to rank for the keywords, because if 3 of the top 10 are ranking for keywords that they obviously are not optimizing for, if I focus my attention and efforts on optimization for the keywords, it’s quite likely I’ll succeed. Also, of the top 10 results, only 3 had the exact phrase “cat pictures” in the title. Having the exact phrase in the title (and especially having the exact phrase BE the title) is a powerful SEO technique, so if only a few of the results have the exact phrase in the title, that’s another sign that competition is light. Finally, I check the number of in-bound links for the top 3 results. That’s easy to do. Just do a search for “link:http://www.therankingpage.com/”.

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