Sell Handmade Stuff On The Internet – SEO, Part Two

Now that you have a list of keywords, we need to look at the competition for those keywords and create a strategy to beat them.

Do a normal Google search on each of your keywords. Write down the top 10 results. Names and URLs are enough. If you have 5 keywords, you should have 5 sets of top 10 results now.

Review those results. Do the same sites come up in more than one of them? Are there a set of sites that seem to “own” these keywords? Some might do a little better with these keywords and others might do a little better with those keywords, but generally, there’s a couple sites that seem to rule the results pages. These are your competition and we are going to crush them, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Now, you should have a feel for the best keywords and who your competition is. They are high on the results pages for these keywords. We need to ask why they are so highly regarded by the search engines. We’re going to dig in deep and find out what’s making them do so well.

Look at their sites first. Look for keywords on the pages, in the links. How many pages do they have? Is it a template with a ton of content pumped through the same template? Is the content unique or published regularly? Does the content change? Is there a blog? Is there a list of links anywhere?

Review each of the competitor sites. Search engines love keywords. They love them in the links. If they have a menu, the menu links will contain these keywords. Blogs that are updated regularly are also great for search engines. Lots of pages and lots of content. Just having a bulk of content is good in the eyes of the search engines.

Now, let’s do a little mathematical analysis. It’s not really harder than anything you had in third grade, but I like using big words sometimes.

Go to the magic SEO site, SiteExplorer on Yahoo.

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Type in a URl from a competitor. First, let’s look at the total number of pages that they have on their site. You want “pages” for “all sub-domains”. Write down that number next to your list of competitors. Did I tell you to make a list of the top competitors? Go back and write that down, then add this total number of pages next to their names.

Step two is to find out who links to them. Inbound links are probably the biggest impact on page rank and SEO. If you can just get a bulk of inbound links to your site, then you’re probably going to do pretty well. There’s another button, up there at the top of the Site Explorer page that says “Inlinks”. You want to see how many “From all pages” to “Entire Site”. Write down the total number of inbound links to their site.

Repeat these steps for each of your competitors. At this point, you should have a bunch of list with names and numbers on them. You should have:

• List of keywords
• List of top 10 results for each keyword – name and URL
• List of competitors – Name and URL
• Number of total pages on each competitor’s site
• Number of total inbound links to each competitor’s site

Run this analysis on your own site. Do you see why they rank higher than you do? Yes, I thought you would.

Next, we’ll talk about how to do what they did and beat them at their own game.