SEO Now Issue 46 - Ranking with Google

Ranking with Google

In order to rank in Google's organic search results you'll need to evaluate each competitor in the top 10 search results for the following:

Site Page Birthdate.
Total Alexa unique IP incoming links.
Total incoming links.
Total incoming links to homepage.
Total incoming links to the specified URL..
Deep-link ratio.
.EDU Links.
.GOV Links.
DMOZ Links.
Yahoo Directory listings.
Wikipedia listings
On-page Optimization.
PageRank

Your goal is to see if you can compete with the sites currently ranking for the keyword phrases you'd like to target..

There needs to be at least one slot in the top 10 that you have a good chance of outranking if you hope to get search engine traffic.

Essentially what you're doing is competitive analysis to determine the quality of your competition.

Those of you who have studied my free Web Site SEO Analysis Report will recognise that it covers just part of one element in the list opposite - namely on-page optimization.

You may also notice that with Google links count for a lot, but not just any links and certainly not just reciprocal links, those days have gone.

Competitor Analysis Reports reveals more about these and other factors in full.

By evaluating these indicators and seeing how your site

stacks up against the top 10 in Google, you'll be able to determine your chances of getting search traffic for that keyword phrase.

The easiest way to get a good idea of when a site was first indexed is by using the Wayback Machine.

If you use whois to determine a site's age, you will only know how long the domain has been registered, not how long a site it been live and indexed by the search engines.

Incoming links from .edu and .gov are favored because they are the most difficult to fake, combined with the presumed incorruptibility of university and government web sites, has led Google to put greater weight on links from these domains.

Google also favors links from sites with human editors that vet the content and suitability of a site, as in the case of DMOZ.

It is for this same reason that links from Wikepedia are now also highly regarded by Google.

The deep-link ratio is the ratio of internal links to homepage links. In general, most high ranking sites in Google have a deep link ratio of 40% or more.

Yahoo's link command used frequently by many to check links counts multiple links from the same domain.

Google however sees multiple links from the same domain (IP address) as one link.

Alexa will give you this information in a basic form - type in the domain name, click traffic rankings, then sites linking in.

There are also many SEO software tools that will give you the same information, but in more detail.

You may start to think from all this that getting a top ranking

with a major search engine can involve a lot of research, particularly for a competitive keyword phrase and you’d be right - it does.

The investment in time and

software to undertake the necessary research can make the task daunting and sometimes very expensive.
It is no accident that SEO companies have grown to fulfil this need.