With so much written about SEO, its easy to be overwhelmed. A simple solution is to learn from your competitors, and copy the tricks used by the ones that have the highest ranking in Google search results. The key to this method is to work within the framework of Google’s view of the world. All that matters is what Google thinks. Once you understand that, you can use it to your advantage.
1. Create Google Alerts for the keywords where you want to rank highly. Google Alerts isn’t perfect, and won’t report everything, but that is fine. It is what Google does report on that matters.
2. When you get a Google Alert, study the site it is from and any competing products it refers to. Look inside the source of this page to see what meta description and keyword tags it uses. SEOs now seem to dismiss these tags, but I find that Google does pay attention to them. See how the keywords you care about are used in these pages. Are they in the title, the headings, the text? Are they in bold face in the text? Learn what works, by studying what works.
3. Stay aware of the sites Google thinks are related to yours with the related: operator. Google bases this result on keyword usage and patterns of links. When a new site appears for this query in your alerts, study it to see how it ranks in comparison from yours. Learn from the ones that rank higher:
related:techcrunch.com
4. Set up alerts for each high ranking competitor using the link: operator. This works better if you exclude internal links with a -site: option:
link:engadget.com -site:engadget.com
5. When you find a site that has linked to your competitor, try to build a relationship through comments, Twitter, and email. If they link to your competitors, they may feel it is their responsibility to cover your site as well.
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