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Your Ranking in Google -
Study your competitor's websites
Ask Susan - Tip of the Month
February 2005
Lots of people want to know how to improve the ranking
of their website in Google. I have a sure way to do that:
just ASK-SUSAN:
- Analyze your current rankings
- Study your competitor's websites
- Key phrase research
- Solicit valuable links to your website
- Update content, title and metatags
- Submit to portals, and directories
- Analyze rankings and traffic data
- Never forget improve
I
will be teaching this, and more, at Central Oregon Community
College in Redmond Oregon this Spring.
Last month we looked at Analyzing your current
rankings.
This month we'll Study your competitor's websites
to get some good ideas.
You know some of your competitors and you can find others
by searching on Google and Yahoo using phrases that describe
your service or product.
Last month you built a draft list of key phrase ideas.
Expand this list by looking at the words and phrases your
competitors are using. They are apt to put their best
key phrases in the metatags and you can view their metatags.
To find their metatags sneak a peak at their website
code. While you are looking at the home page, or any page
on their website in the Internet Explorer browser, you
can select "View" (third one from the left)
and then "source" (third from the bottom in
the pull down). Whoaa! that's a lot of code. Look for
<META Name="keywords" Content="all
their best key phrases">.
What else can you learn from your competitors? Some are
ranked really well for good key phrases. Why? Look at
the way the Web page and website are constructed, look
at the titles, text content, and link names. Do they have
a site map? What does it look like? Who links to their
website?
To find out who links to their website, use Yahoo.com
and in the search line type; "linkdomain:www.theirwebsitename.com
-site:www.theirwebsitename.com".
Also look at their directory listings in the Open Directory
(dmoz.org) which supports the rankings in Google, and
in the Yahoo directory. Type in the website name to find
the listing. If they know what they're doing they will
use the best key phrases in the directory listing.
You will learn a lot about how the search engines work
and get good ideas to improve you own rankings.
Next month we'll look at an easy way to refine that list
of key phrases to identify those that are going to help
you make money.
Best Regards, Susan Hankins
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