There was a piece of the puzzle I was missing in my keyword research method. I was finding daily search totals, overall competing pages, but what I was not checking was how difficult it would be to beat the top pages already showing for my keywords.
This one small oversight is what causes a lot of duds when it comes to minisites based on keywords. You can have only a few sites come back as competition, but what if they are authority sites or all PR 5s? Don’t think it can happen? You’d be surprised.
It is difficult, notice I didn’t say impossible to outrank these kinds of sites with the methods we are using for these niche websites. First you want to know who your actual competition is. These are the sites that will be coming up when people search for your keywords, so there are no quotes involved here. I mean really, who actually searches with quotes?
So now you’ve identified your competition. If you have the google toolbar you can go to each site and find out the page rank for each site. OR you could get this handy dandy Firefox add on called SEO Quake. Seo Quake is a free easy to use add on. All you have to do is click the add to firefox button, and once it downloads restart your browser.
SEO Quake will allow you to quickly asses your competition. There will be a small bar below the search returns filled with tons of important information. You will be able to see the page rank for each site, as well as how many pages the site has indexed in google. It will also show you the number of inbound links which is important for you to know, as this is a number you may need to beat to overtake this site in the search engines. There is much more information provided in this add on but for today’s purpose we only need the page rank.
I suggest you take a look at the top 4 search engine results. Using the niche website internet marketing strategy you can easily beat out all sites with a page rank of 3 or less. If you have a site that comes up with a page rank of 4 you want to check and see if there is an exact keyword match in the title. If there is a keyword match in the title you don’t want to go forward with this keyword. Don’t get me wrong, you can beat it, but why bother. It’s going to take a bit of effort and there are much easier keywords to tackle. If there is NOT a keyword match in the title you can take on a page rank 4 site.
If you see a page rank 5 or above, forget it. It’s not going to be worth the effort, and you can find other keywords that will be much easier to rank for. You also want to be on the look out for “authority sites” These are sites that have categories below the listing. It looks something like this:
Internet Marketing @ Court’s Internet Marketing School
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If you take a look at the listing for Court’s site you will see there are at least 9 different ways a person can click on this site before they get to the second search result. You do not want to even try to compete for keyword placement when an authority site comes up. (so forget ranking for courtney tuttle lol)
I think you will find you have a lot more success with keywords actually ranking when you make sure to check what kind of page rank you are really competing against. This method definitely does work, but you have to know what you are up against.
The SEO Quake add on makes finding all this information very easy, in fact, it it right at your fingertips. There is only one more suggestion I will make regarding this add on. Don’t run it all the time. You will see a button in the bottom toolbar where you can click it to turn it off. It’s best to only run this add on when you really need the information it provides.
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SEO Quake is awesome when used with Google search operators but does anyone know how to filter by PR?
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