Ok here’s a step that works on a supposition that one would rather compete against 100 people for $10, as opposed to 1,000,000,000 people for $100,000. Check out your competition and compete for SERP against fewer, weaker opponents.
The first and most basic step is to type your search term into google [my keyword]. This will be how people will find your site, so I guess it’s the most important (it’s not really). I don’t even really look at the number of competitors at this level, what’s more important is PR. If there are 6’s and 7’s at the top few sports on the SERPs you’re in trouble with this keyword (Even 5’s are tough). If the PR’s are 4 or less you should have NO problem getting a good ranking for your keyword (Don’t worry you wont need to get to PR5 to beat a 4 if you build your site properly).
The second step is a more targeted search by quoting your keyword ["my keyword"]. This is where I start to look at my number of competitors. More than 2 million and I’m not happy, more than 5 million and I’m really not happy (will only do it if it’s a really juicy keyword), more than 10 million and I’m going and looking for a new keyword. PR is important at this step too. Hopefully no one has higher than a 5, if they do then take that into account with the number of competitors and think if you want to work this hard to make a small site.
Third do a targeted search for the top two criteria for on site keyword ranking, your title and URL (I’ll talk about this in steps 4 & 5)[allintitle:"your keyword" & allinurl:"your keyword"]. The number of sites that come up for these should be a lot lower. Look for numbers less than 50k for these, and again preferably under PR5. If there is a site that comes up number 1 rank for both of these searches and has a high PR it will be tough to beat out.
Anyway if you make it through this step and are still happy then you’ve probably found a winner so congratulations. Next time we’ll get into building your site and the fun begins.
7 comments ↓
i checked step 1, 2 and now 3…waiting for other steps to come… Good work dude.
Should have #4 up for tomorrow. I hope people are actually following along trying to build a site with me. I realize the going is slow, but sometimes it’s good to do them slow as it forces a sober second thought
I wish I had the time to make one, but that, time is in short supply these days. But I am looking forward to reading the rest.
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I’ll disagree about checking competitors PR. For now you could reach 1st position at google with 0 PR. Page Rank now means how relevant backlink and your website in total is.
Yes you could reach 1st position with PR0, but if there is a PR5 in that spot it’s a lot harder to do then if there is a PR2 there.
I think google’s latly been up and down like a yoyo.
Ranking spikiings and moving about all over the place.
And yeah, PR 0’s beating pr5’s which have more keyword links..etc - Also alot of sites getting PR Wacked.
Page rank can give some clue as to how very linked a page it but ultimatley I think it is the number of links and the anchor text used in these links is what determines how well a page ranks
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