Is there a way to determine your competition?

[High Horsepower]

Is there a way to determine how many actual Websites I'm trying to compete with, not pages?

Thanks.

[John Williamson]

Forget about competing pages, allintitle, and all that jazz. Just go look at who's on page 1, check out their stats, and see if you can do better...

[High Horsepower]

Originally Posted by John Williamson

Forget about competing pages, allintitle, and all that jazz. Just go look at who's on page 1, check out their stats, and see if you can do better...

I've checked so-called stats through SEOBOOK toolbar and it doesn't provide the needed info. Yahoo, SEM, etc...

I see in many Local markets that a site with 50 backlinks and Top notch ONpage SEO can outrank top directories with Millions of backlinks, like YellowPages.

Why is that?

Any input would be appreciated.

[perzefi]

Use Traffic Travis to analyse competitors , It Free

[BacklinkExcellence]

Originally Posted by High Horsepower

I see in many Local markets that a site with 50 backlinks and Top notch ONpage SEO can outrank top directories with Millions of backlinks, like YellowPages.

Why is that?

Because of exactly that: In G's eyes they are more relevant to the target search query. They have their URL (sometimes even domain) and onpage content optimized for that local keyword, the big directories with a ton of links might mention the broad match term or just part of the keyword somewhere on their site, as well as a million other things. Then it just takes a couple of good anchor text links and google realizes you're more relevant to a target search query than the big and broad directory.

[John Williamson]

Originally Posted by High Horsepower

I've checked so-called stats through SEOBOOK toolbar and it doesn't provide the needed info. Yahoo, SEM, etc...

I see in many Local markets that a site with 50 backlinks and Top notch ONpage SEO can outrank top directories with Millions of backlinks, like YellowPages.

Why is that? I'm guessing that it's much easier to rank for Local and these National sites are geared more toward the Main keyword, say Realtor, Lawyer, et... but Ft Wayne Lawyer for a local site can outrank the Big Dogs?

Any input would be appreciated.

Because the actual page on YellowPages has little to no backlinks.