How To Out Rank Your Competitors

Free SEO Image

Here are some simple SEO tips that I use to Out Rank Competitors. These little tricks will help you understand your competition by analyzing their data and ranking positions for certain keywords. If you are brand new to SEO here are some great tools to get you started so that you can dominate your competition via search engine optimization.

You will want to use some website like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or SpyFu. These sites will allow you to analyze the backlinks of your competition to see how many they have and where they are coming from. If you have done any keyword research this is very handy. You will basically just want to copy what they have done but add even more.

Next you will want to use WebWordCount.com. This tools checks out your competition to see how many words and pages the website has. This will help you determine how many articles you should have on your website to get the same or better rankings.

Lastly, one of my favorite tricks is to just contact your niche competitor and see how much money they make. To do this we simply send them a basic email. Most of your competition should have a contact page. Fill out the basic information but do not use your niche information. Set up a separate generic gmail address. DO NOT use something like MyNiche@gmail.com. We do not want to let them know that you are a competitor. They may work harder to rank their site and not provide you valuable information.

Typically I write a basic email like this: “Hey I really like your website and was wondering if you were interested in selling it. Please contact me if you are interested.”

You should hopefully get a reply from them with some useful information. If they give you a price or ask how much you are going to offer, you will want to send them a reply on the lines of “To get a better understanding of how much your site may be worth, I would need a monthly revenue and traffic report so that I can give you my best offer.

If they supply this information to you great. You will want to use that information to see if it is worth spending more money, time, and effort on out ranking them. Also if the price is right you may want to actually purchase the website and add to your portfolio or flip it to make some extra profit. Typically anything that sells for below 10 months actual income is a good deal.

If they do not reply just move on. Sometime they do not want to reply as they think you may be SPAM or sometimes they just don’t check emails. You could be really persistent and keep sending them emails so that they know you are not a bot. The choice is up to you. Just use these simple techniques and you will have a jump start on out ranking your competition via SEO.

Content Guidelines for Article Writers

pen and paper free imageWhen contacting and hiring freelancers for articles I make them follow specific guidelines so that the articles are well formatted for SEO purposes. After they have submitted the article I proofread it and manually make changes so that they are optimized and formatted correctly.

Here are the guidelines I present to them. These are using 500 word articles that I pay $5 – $10 for:

Title: Best weed wacker to buy online –  should be formatted with H1 tag
I then tell the copywriter that they need to write about the topics listed below and that they should be formatted with H2 tags

  • Best battery powered weed wacker priced from $75 – $200
  • Best electric weed wacker
    • list the features and differences from other versions
  • Best weed wacker for home use
    • list features and difference from other versions.

Typically I like all of my articles to be around 400-500 words. When creating guides I usually shoot for 2500 – 3500 words. I then structure those and break them down as follows. 300 words for the introduction, 300 words for each item (Typically 7-10 items to review). For these larger guides you may need to pay around $50 -$75. I like to find students that are knowledgeable and willing to write high quality content and hire them from a freelance website like odesk.

SEO steps to complete for a new website

So you just purchased a new domain name and are about to launch a new website. These are some simple steps you should follow to get started on the right track from the beginning.

  • Make sure the website is set up correctly and there are no errors. This includes dead links and broken links.
  • Submit the new website to Google and Bing and possibly other engines using the webmaster tool.
  • Create an XML Sitemap and Robots.txt.
  • Make sure you have no duplicate content.
  • Make sure your website passes W3C validation. Just the home page would be sufficient but if possible all internal pages as well.
  • Configure .htaccess.
  • Start creating backlinks. The older the better so get started ASAP.

 

These are just a few simple rules to follow to help optimize your site from the start. You will then want to optimize even more with on and off page optimization, meta tags, and image optimization.

Now keep producing fresh and original content and your site will be ranking in now time.