Many webmasters don't use an analytical approach to out rank their competitors.

Have you been down this road? Just drop links everywhere, anywhere, hoping that Google, Yahoo, and MSN will believe that you are generating natural links. Submitting to thousands of free directories, blog comment spamming, and hundreds of posts on a forum or two seems to be in vogue.

The search engines are not as good at identifying related, themed links as you might think at this point.... but I am confident that they will get better and better and better at it.

So, let discuss exactly how you can quantify the competition for a particular keyphrase rather than using random approaches that some other webmaster told you worked for them, in a totally unrelated niche, against different competition.

First, lets pick a somewhat competitive keyphrase and do some research. The keyphrase we will work with is costa rica hotels. First lets use Google and do a simple search for the keyphrase.

This simply tells us that Google has indexed about 979,000 pages with all or some of the words costa rica hotels somewhere in the page. So, is this good or bad? We will just make some notes for now and deal with that later.

Now lets search for the exact phrase "costa rica hotels".

So, this means that the exact phrase can be found on 313,000 pages in the Google index. That's far fewer pages but still a lot. So, we make a note of this number as well. The next thing we want to know is how many pages have the exact phrase in the title of the page.

Now this is telling us that 35,300 pages contain these words in the title of the web pages indexed for this keyphrase. Two other numbers we need are the number of links with these words in the anchor text (allinanchor: costa rica hotels) and those that are contained in urls (allinurl:costa rica hotels). I omitted the images because this page is going to be way to heavy before I am through!

To recap what we have so far:

So, you may be asking what this has to do with ranking on page 1 of Google, Yahoo, or elsewhere for this specific term. Simply put, not so much. This is the sort of thing, however, that is important to keep track of so you can compare your next effort at ranking some other keyphrase to get an idea of the supply side of things associated with the flagship keywords you would use Wordtracker and other products to compare to demand (how many times people search for the keyphrase).

Did you notice that one particular site ranked tops for each of the three images shown above. These guys are now between our crosshairs. Let's first look at the domain strength for centralamerica.com

We will do that by querying our domain strength tool to get an idea of the age, PageRank, backlinks, and indexed pages of the domain.

So, before we start obsessing about keyword density and links lets do a reality check. This PageRank 5 domain is 12 1/2 years old with 3,389 indexed pages. A quick browsing review of the site indicates that it has plenty of hotel listings in the country in question and has no tendency to do spammy things on page.

I don't put much stock in magical keyword density ratio's and this page is a great example of why. Lets look at the page specifics for our keyphrase.

So, this page must be ranking because of inbound links, internal linkage, and obviously domain strength. The age of the domain, and especially the age of the backlinks a domain has pointing to their bread and butter pages is generally the reason that consistent ranking becomes possible for profitable keywords.

So, lets look at the links that our competitor has for this page. To do that we need a way to obtain as many of the links as possible, so we use our backlink analysis tool to get as much information as we can about those links.

First, lets go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the page url into the input box. The result in this case shows that this page currently has 181 external backlinks and 292 internal links included in Site Explorer results. Next we will export these results to a tab delimited file by selecting the "Export results to: TSV" link on the top right of the page.

The backlink analysis for this page was somewhat surprising to me but if there is one thing I know its that nothing about search engine optimization and website development is written in stone or concrete in nature. There are certainly good practices, bad practices, and black hat techniques that we all should be aware of, but this example is why using some other guy's method to rank usually does not work. Here are the relevant anchor text results for this page.

So, what conclusions can we draw from this exercise? I will list my ideas below but before I do let me mention that this site has a lot of hotels listed and includes 292 internal links to this page. I wouldn't be surprised if the anchor text used was varied but quite relevant to our keyphrase costa rica hotels.

Page Strength Attributes

• Domain is 12 years old, PageRank 5, has 3,389 indexed pages and 10,100 domain ibl's
• Page is PageRank 5
• Page has strong internal linking
• Anchor text is varied
• Most likely internal links use relevant anchor text

So, whats next. Simple, go to the SERP #2 ranking page and analyze that domain and page for comparison. Then do SERP #3. Are they all 12 year old domains with thousands of pages and strong PageRank? In this particular case SERP #2 is a 5 3/4 year old domain. So, what did they do different? This type of analysis will provide enough information to get a feel for what it will take to compete for this keyphrase.

• Vary your anchor text
• Link in the right neighborhood
• Try to achieve better topical linking than your competition
• Get authoritative links
• Maintain your linking strategy long enough to analyze the results (people are so impatient!)
• Pages are indexed and have a recent cache date
• Does the page have backlinks on Site Explorer
• Don't get PageRank fever

Part 2 of this exercise will include analysis of the internal pages that link back to this page. What if some of those pages have tons of backlinks and the pages are crafted to flow that juice to this page? That would be something we would not want to leave out of our thought process.

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