Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

Outrank Your Competition By Taking One More Step

Posted: 03 Mar 2010 07:45 AM PST

I love competition. I compete against just about anyone, at just about anything. For the last few years, competitive webmastering has been my focus. I like to start a site in a small to medium sized niche, and outrank everyone. There are two niches that I hold the top 5 spots for, and it’s exciting. Let me give you a few secrets that you can implement right now to help you outrank your competition.

1. Do what they do.

The first step is to try to get all of the links that your competition has. If they’re linked in Wikipedia, you should try to get linked. If they pay $299 for a Yahoo Directory link you should too. If they put out a little cash for regional web directories like WoW Directory and Ezilon Web Directory, so should you. The point is that in order to beat your competition you need to have everything they do, and more.

2. Grab the easy links they don’t have.

There are generally two sides to the linkbuilding argument. One side says to focus on quality links, the other says to focus on large quantities of links. I agree with both. Since it’s easy to get junk links from sites like Twitter, blog comments, forum profiles, wikis, etc, go get those links! When you’re burnt out with those junk links, move on to the next step. Don’t discount quantity, I have sites that rank #1 with mass junk links.

3. Start getting the difficult links.

For the last couple years I’ve been following viagra SERPs. If you browse the top 20 sites for “buy viagra” you’ll see interesting trends. Right now I see a site that is 6 months old with 4k links, PR 2 ranked #4. Below it is a 2 year old site with 29k links, PR 6 ranked #9. Why does that new site outrank that older better linked site? Link quality. This site went the extra mile to get links.

4. Make the quality links if you can’t find them.

I’ve got burnt out on buying links. Instead, I’ve been making quality websites with the purpose of linking them back to my money site. These sites are generally built on existing WPMU domains (like these). I build links to these blogs and seed them with some generic spun content. Once they start getting some age and trust I link them to my money pages. This enables me to have good old blogs linking to my money pages without paying for those links. It does take extra time, but I can continue using the same blogs for additional projects after I get my #1 rankings.

In order to outrank the competition you have to go above and beyond what they are doing!

Over the last 5 years, Brandon Hopkins owns over 150 content-rich websites. When not building links to his own websites he does linkbuilding for clients as well as Fresno website design. Brandon can also be found blogging (rarely) at Brandon-Hopkins.com as well on about 5 different webmaster forums, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and most other social networking sites.
photo credit: ianmunroe