How To Reverse Engineer the Competition

Posted by Nathan Sloan in Featured How To, How To

So you want to know how to reverse engineer the competition? Well then, you are going to love this post!

OK so you have found some potential keywords that you would like to get to Position 1 for, but how do you know if it is easily doable or that you will be about to waste your time and money?

This post is all about how to reverse engineer the competition and find out all about the current websites on Page 1 using an awesome tool called Market Samurai.

Before We Start
I recommend you download the Market Samurai free trial so that you do this for yourself. This post is designed to get you to expert level in the shortest amount of time possible.

Everything You Need To Know About SEO

Here is a quick breakdown of everything you need to know about how to get a Position 1 ranking. This is basically the 20% of information you need that will get you 80% of your results. SEO is split in to two categories. Off Page and On Page.

Off Page Optimization

1. Domain Age
The first point we look at is the domain age. This is just how old the website is. All things being equal, search engines prefer older websites. This is because there is a lower chance that they will be a low quality spam type site. A 10 year old website has more authority than a brand new website.

2. Page Rank
Google ranks all websites from Page Rank 0 (a brand new website) to a Page Rank 10. The higher your Page Rank the better. It means you have more authority and better quality websites linking to you. Google.com is a Page Rank 10 website.

3. Index Count
The index count is just how big the website is. It is how many pages they have indexed in the search engines. Again the more pages, the bigger the website and the easier it will be for you to rank. A 100 page website is a lot easier to rank than a 5 page website.

4. Page Backlinks
This is how many websites are linking to this particular page. As we all know links are still the major factor on how well you rank in the search engines. Higher quality links are better than quantity. You just need better quality links than the person in Position 1 to out rank them.

5. BLEG – Government and Educational Links
BLEG links are links are known to carry more weight and have more authority than just links from a normal website. These are from websites that end in .edu and .gov websites.

6. Dmoz and Yahoo Directory
Just remember that you want to have a wide diverse link network. Directories do carry some weight and two of the best ones to have a listing in are the Yahoo and DMOZ directory.

On Page Optimization

1. Keyword in the Page Title
Now we get to the on page factors. This just means what is actually on the website. The first main point is to have the ‘keyword’ in the page title. This is very important. If you do nothing else just have your keyword in the page title.

2. Keyword in URL
Another important place to have your keyword is in the URL of the page. If you are using WordPress then as long as you have your keyword in the page title then it will automatically place it in the URL for you.

3. Keyword in the META Data
You want to make sure that you set your META data for your web pages and not Google. By using a plugin called Platinum SEO (or any other similar plugin), you can easily put your keyword in the META title, description and keywords. Do this.

4. Keyword in H1 Tag
Does your keyword show up in any headlines on your page. You don’t want to stuff your keyword in several places, however it’s good to include it at least once in your page.

Summary
I truly wish I would have had this post when I first started out. I wasted 3 months of my life going for keywords that I was never going to be able to rank for. If you want to find out if you can rank for your chosen keyword, you can get access to the Market Samurai free trial through [THIS LINK].

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Nathan Sloan

CEO at IM to Freedom

Nathan has been online marketing for over 4 years. He became financially free in 2012 and has since created over 2 Million pounds in sales for his clients. He lives with his girlfriend in London.

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Tags: how to get a page 1 ranking, How To Reverse Engineer Your Competition, market samurai, search engine optimization