The BIG ?- How Would You Compete with this Site?

Are you dancing around many niches with the products you are offering or are they all in the same niche more or less?

How aged is your domain and is your keyword in the domain?

When you say you have hundreds of links... what kind of links are we talking about (as in... from related sites, web 2.0 sites, etc)?

Type in your competitors domain here: http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

That will give you a fairly good idea as to what you are up against. You can than type in your keyword itself and see what Google would like to see!

Konrad

They are all in the same niche. For example if the niche is hair loss (it is not), I would offer the hair loss lotion and hair brushes...I would not offer Ipods and cameras.

All the articles on the site relate to the same niche, photos etc.

Yes all unique content written by me (and I do not post the content on article directories) For each article I also spend time selecting just the right photo. I also have social sites (ie Twitter etc) and am building a list.

LilBlackDress (love that name) - Here are a few things I always look at when comparing my sites to a competitor. Maybe they'll help you pinpoint some SEO differences.

1. Is the main keyword for the niche in the competitor's URL? Is it in your's?

2. Are the main keywords in the other site's meta description tag? Are they in yours?

3. Using a keyword density checker, how well is one site optimized for keywords vs. the other site?

4. How many backlinks does one site have vs. the other, how do the page ranks of one site's backlinks stack up to the other site's backlinks, and what anchor text has been used for those backlinks? (I use Market Samurai to give me this information but I think there's a free tool that can help - SEO Spyglass?)

5. In your browser, select View/Page Source and check out the competitor site's use of title tags vs. your site. Each page should have at least 1 <h1> title tag and I always change my site's theme (I use WP) to optimize each page for it's own <h1> title. Every little bit of onsite SEO helps.

6. Use the Firefox NoDoFollow plug in and check for outbound dofollow leaks on your site. I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes but I'll manually tweak my site as needed to "nofollow" outbound links to anything but my own work.

7. Are you using "alt" tags for your images? Depending on what your niche is (and you mentioned photos), using the alt tag can help you get photos ranked in the search engines as well as your individual site and post pages.

The PR3 on the competitor's page probably presents some added challenge if your site has a lower page rank, but if you have lots of unique content updated regularly and the right SEO combination (onsite and offsite optimization), you should stand a good chance of at least getting close to the other site, if not passing them.

I enjoy comparing sites. Feel free to PM me if you'd like me to take a look or if I can help in any way.

Good luck!

If their site is ranking well and presumably making money and you have reversed engineered it (I.E. found out how they are doing it), then just copy it on your own mini site and see how things go.

Outsource all the link building for faster results. Outsourcing will also mean that you won't personally have to do all the tedious link building.

It may also help to buy an aged domain to build your mini site on. One which already has PR and solid incoming links.

Konrad ~ I do use article directories. But I use different articles then on my site. I have noticed they post a ton of spun articles on low level sites. But their links are everywhere.

Sojourn ~ Sounds great! I have pm'd you.

Christian ~ So you are saying start again with a smaller site. What strategy would you follow for linkbuilding?

Yeah. If they have a small site (only 5 pages of content) which is ranking well and making them money then do the same thing.

But we have to understand why they are ranking well. So that we can replicate it.

Without seeing the site I would imagine it has good on page optimization and that it's aged. (i.e. first registered a while back). You can use domaintools.com to check.

And like you said it has thousands of incoming links.

So what you would want to do is do the same. Get an aged domain and build links.

Or you could just continue to build solid links on your existing site and eventually overtake him. It just depends on what angle you would prefer.

As for links, there are so many different options to choose from.

1. Pay someone else to build links for you
2. Angela and pauls backlink service (I.E. dropping links at high pr sites)
3. Blog commenting
4. Forum posting
5. Articles
6. Pad submits
7. Press releases
8. Social bookmarking
9. Web 2 sites
10. Link swapping

The strategy would just be consistent and make sure that you vary up where your links come from and the anchor text to which they point at your site.

If you outsourced your linking strategy you could easily link to both your existing larger site and also to a new mini site (if you choose to create one). From there you could see which works best.

It's better to have more pages then less.
Just continue adding new pages to your site and building links to it.

Many many thanks to Sojourn who did a side by side comparison of the two sites for me. I was stunned to see my competitor had pages and pages of content that was almost hidden. I have about 250+ pages and they have 1300+ (but it was so hidden I only saw 5). And she pointed out other things I had missed.

Many thanks! Now I really know what I am up against...be scared oooohhoooo