My "Competing Pages" Experiment

[rimam1]

Lots of SEO's will tell you to check for "competing pages" as part of your keyword research. They usually look for keywords with less than 100k or 500k competing pages before you decide on a niche. The idea is to get a keyword that is searched highly enough (at least 100/day) and has few competing pages.

I've followed this method for some sites, but noticed that competing pages really means nothing for other sites that I've been able to rank really well for. So I'm starting an experiment and will keep you guys posted via this thread.

I've started a new website with a keyword that has 16,000,000 competing pages. After analyzing the links to the sites on the first page of Google, I'm confident get on the first page of Google for my keyword. Here are the tactics that I'll be using:

1). Blog commenting
2). Article submission
3). Directory submission
4). Social bookmarking
5). Guest posts
6). Software directory submission
7). Posting on forums and discussion boards
8). Maybe video marketing
9). Squidoo/Hubpages/Weebly
10). Angela/Paul's packets
11). Viral widgets

I'll keep you posted on my progress.

[clickbump]

Whew, that seems like a lot of work you have cut out for yourself there. How do you manage it all?

Its a serious question, spreadsheets, a third party tool, market sam?

[Paul Hancox]

Interesting experiment, but I don't know why people call them competing pages. They are just pages Google has indexed.

The way I see it, if you're at #23 for a certain keyphrase, then you have 22 REAL competitors - those sites that are ahead of you! The other X thousand, million or billion behind you are irrelevant, unless they are also seriously attempting for the Top 10 (which most aren't).