Recently, Jay posted a review about one of our most utilized tools, SEO Elite, and how one of the features the program has lets you scan for sites with your keywords in their Title Tags, Anchor Tags and in the Text. I’m going get a bit more in depth as to why this information is useful and how to use it.
So, you’ve just come up with the perfect idea for your next site and you’re ready to start promoting it in the SERPS with some choice terms. However, do you have any idea how difficult it will be to rank for your term? Are you facing a leisurely stroll up a slight incline, or an unassisted climb of Mount Everest? You don’t know? Why not?
When Jay and I are looking into new sites to launch - ones that we intend to primarily promote through search engine rankings - the first thing we do when we come up with an idea is check how competitive the terms are that have traffic. A great number of our ideas have been quashed before they began after a result of such investigations. It’s not that we’re taking on a defeatist attitude and deciding not to try any competitive terms, but we both have full time jobs and making money online is a side thing for us now. We have to prioritize out time, and spending our limited time to rank for an extremely competitive term doesn’t make sense for us right now.
SEO Elite makes it a lot easier to gauge your competition accurately. Due to the unpredictable nature of the SERPS, there is no surefire way to know exactly what you’re up against. However, the more information you have, the easier your decisions will be.
We start by coming up with the keywords or phrases we want to rank for. You can use Wordze, Overture or Wordtracker for this. Once you have a list of what you want to rank for, you can start running them through SEO Elite projects for All in Title , Anchor and Text. The results from those projects will give you an idea of how many indexed sites on the Internet are using those keywords and phrases in the title, text and links from other websites.
How is this useful? It’s a good indicator of competition. If the results come back for one key phrase and there are tons of results, then you’re probably looking at a difficult time getting ranked for that particular term. However, if there are only a few, then it’s more likely you’ll have an easier battle. These numbers can be compiled manually, but why spend hours doing it when SEO Elite can compile them in ten minutes?
Good Profits.
