SEO Question: Can I compete with this?

With good SEO from the beginning, a good domain, and a lot of hard work you should be able to break into the market within a year. This isn't a scientific hypothesis so it is a very rough ball park figure.. it all depends on a lot of variables and how good you are at following the guidelines.

^^^ Thanks!

Would you suggest buying an existing domain with a little age on it?

One question to ask might be is "if it does take years to break into will it be worth it?"
There is nothing wrong with working on one project that will eventually secure your retirement while working on more immediate, less competitive niches for immediate income.
So if it does take 3 years to accomplish at the very least you know that when the time comes you are in for some excitement.

Plus 1600 back-links doesn't seem to be that many now days.
For real excitement try going after competitor's sites that have over 1,000,000 backlinks

No better thrill than when you overtake that site with 1,000,000 BLs with your 1,200 measly bls.
Also, often these "Authority" sites tend to get cocky and quit paying attention to details. They quit caring about fast loading pages, coding errors, and other "loopholes" that you can use to sneak towards the top when no one is looking.

Keep in mind that there is more than one way to get to a solution. 1+5 = 6 , 3+3=6, 4+2=6, etc...and the Google Machine is just math in reality.

So I say if you have the energy in you to go for the gold then do it. It May not be as hard as you think and regret sucks.

Ken

Hi Charles,

Even if you are competing with these sites, you still have a chance. Here is what you can do.

1. Research some long tail keywords you can target to break in the market. Of course, do not target 'information keywords'. Target 'buyer keywords' instead. You can detect buyer keywords by taking an honest look at your keywords and determining if the people who will type it are buyers or not.

2. Take a look at (1) the onpage optimization factors of the site you are competing with - title, HTML tags like bold, h2, etc. and others and (2) backlinks and the anchor text of the links. You will find what keywords they are targetting and what keywords they are not targetting. This will help you break in easier.

3. Focus your content and link building on one keyword at a time. You can easily dominate longtails. The longest time for that is a week. Target one long tail after another and get significant traffic dripping into your site.

4. Rinse and repeat. Research more. Since you are an ecommerce site, you can target brand keywords which usually convert better.

Hope that helps

Aira

OK Charles, first of all I would not use the average of the top ten PR and backlinks. I would look exclusively at the PR and backlinks of the top three on the first page of Google. Why? Because you want to be in one or all of the top three slots for your keywords. As a rule of thumb, anything PR3 or less is doable in a relatively short space of time. PR4 and above takes a little longer and I'd avoid those keywords until you have more experience.

I ignore domain age - Google is interested in it but it isn't such a huge factor, otherwise all you'd need to do is buy a fourteen year old domain and slap content on it.

Basically, when you are looking at the top three sites in your keyword you are just looking to match their backlinks. So use a tool like Market Samurai, or a site like Link Diagnosis, to spy on their backlinks and keywords. Then make a plan about how you are going to get a similar or identical set of backlinks, but with one crucial difference. You are going to go one better than them, and get slightly more / slightly stronger links.

Aira has it bang on when she says to focus on one keyword at a time. I would start to build your site by building pages that target easy to rank keywords, and focus on just one to start with. For an ecommerce site this should be a lot easier to do as you can approach all sorts of website owners in any niche that is connected to your page's keyword, and offer them a good article in return for allowing you to include two or three backlinks to your site using your keywords as anchor link text. Once you are ranking well for that first keyword, you'll find that your site starts to get trust and authority in Google's eyes. Then it is time to move on to choosing your next easy to rank keyword, and build up your ranking on that one with great content on your website and backlinks from quality content on trusted and authority external sites.

As a ballpark figure, most keywords, especially long tail keywords, 'only' need 30 or so strong links in order for your page to rank in the top 5 for that keyword.

Although in the long term you do want to target brand keywords as they convert better and make you money, when you are starting out and trying to get quality incoming links you'll find it harder to place quality brand content out there (on other people's quality sites) and easier to use more generalised content that other people's sites will want to use, and then you can have one general backlink and one specific one for your brand or buyer keyword.

e.g. I find a high quality high PR website on the subject of literary books. I would email the owner and ask them if they would be interested in a great article about the top ten literary mistakes of all time (which I could hire somebody to write for me if I didn't have the expertise), in exchange for a couple of backlinks to my site (one in the article and one in my author bio at the end). The anchor text link in the article main body or author bio could be a general one (let's say 'books' is a keyword that covers one of the categories I'll be selling on my ecommerce site) and the one in the author bio could be much more specific ('Paul Williams is a book fanatic and has a special passion for (anchor link)how to write a novel(anchor link) style books.')

Timescale - I'd give it a month or two for lower competition long tail keywords, and six months for the higher competition keywords.

Hope that helps.

Hi Charles,

The PR of the sites and the number of backlinks suggests to me that you are not competing with brands or suppliers that have been there forever. Very hard to win with these guys drawing all the traffic at number one.

Yes I have had good results by grabbing an aged domain with some similar PR.

The real question is not the number of links or the PR of the site but just how strong those competitors are.

Once again this is a look at their sites and see if what you are proposing would stack up in an even race.

If so from an SEO perspective you would need to use a tool such as Market Samurai, to help you see the strength of those backlinks that each of the top players are there with.

No use guessing and taking on more than you can realistically compete with. It can be soul destroying to put in all that effort without first knowing for sure that you can win the race.

Hope this helps.

G.

I would not try to rank the main index for keywords, rank individual internal pages e.g. the pages for each of the categories of goods you'll sell.

Charles,

No problem, you can compete. I started my site in 2008 and my competition was as follows (three different sites):

PR5, site age 5+ years, all sites had well over 4,000 inbound links. One with over 15k inbound links.

I am now in top 3 position for my three main KWs and doing very well on several others. With a good SEO strategy and consistent follow through, you will succeed.

Good luck!

PS. I should also mention that how quickly you rank and how successful you are will be significantly affected by how smart your competition has been in their SEO efforts. I would definitely spend a good amount of time looking at their inbound links for things such as - anchor text, PR of inbound link and, relevancy. If they were smart with their SEO, you will have a greater challenge. If they were not smart, will make your life much easier.

Aira is correct - go after long-tail buyer keywords first. Then go after the bigger fish.

There are, however, other things that you can do in the meantime. You can set up a PPC campaign to funnel traffic in before you're properly SEO'd. (If the economics work out) and you can also get tied into places like Google Shopping such that you come up when people search in Google for your product.

Increasingly if you hit the market hard with a lot of social networking, blogging and other Web 2.0 stuff it's possible to challenge the existing market relatively quickly - Google Caffeine is challenging a lot of the existing world order....

I agree fresh content is what caffeine is searching for

airabongco has got it right in my opinion.

It would take me less than 6 months to "organically" beat such a site in the SERPs.

But what I would do is target the long tail phrases. You can easily get the same, if not more traffic, from focusing on the long tail phrases than on competitive keywords.

Hi Charles,

Here is a tip and a fact.

Keyword rich domains .com, .net, and .org's have allowed me to continually rank
new websites right along side the big boys like wikipedia, ask, amazon and the like.

In my opinion, there is no other more powerful method than a keyword rich domain with good solid content.

It has been my experience to place a website with just 5 unique articles and 1/100th the amount of backlinks and still outrank authority sites with page ranks of 5-6-7 with a keyword rich domain.

I'm talking brand new domains that sit atop optimized websites here. 0 Page rank with unique content. Results inside of 60 days are not uncommon.

Keyword rich domains rule the web!

Put backlinks on those and have an unmovable force!

Hope that helps Charles.

Go get one!

Yep "keywordrichdomain.com" is your answer.

Now what if you can't get the .com, .net, .org?

Answer grab one you can get it ranked No#1 and place a dofollow link to your moneysite. All the link juice flows to your site.

Do this search:

credit cards

Look who beats mastercard.com and visa.com

G.