All, I am not quite sure if my approach to boost the ranking of my site qualifies as SEO - so I'd like to hear your opinion. Here is the approach I took: I manage a website on which I sell project management related products. I looked through the sites of my top 10 competitors and analyzed the text on their site. I made a note of all the "important" phrases and words that I could find I used search engine reports and keyword reports to learn what words and phrases people are searching for. I then created the text for my own website and I incorporated all of these phrases and words into my own website text. Now my newbie question... is this considered SEO or not?
Thats half of it. Did you update your meta tags, create a sitemap, and submit your site to search engines? Got a link to your site?
Yes, meta tags are updated and the site has been spidered by all the big search engines. Not sure what you mean by "create a sitemap" - would you please explain? The site is www.pmprepcast.com
I hope your not "using" your competitors content on your site, this is called "duplicate content" and can hurt your search results positioning.
I thought duplicate content meant having the same content in multiple places on the same domain or page. So if I'm selling the same golf club as someone else and we both have the same title and some of the same information, we would both be penalized?
Duplicate content can be on web pages on different sites or one site. You missing the point of my question, if your using their content than yes it can be considered duplicate content.
No, IMO, Neither of you would be penalized but IF the content was mostly the exact same then you wouldn't get the full benefit of having original content that users can't find in other places on the Internet. I think Google will rank the more authoritative site on the subject but you won't get "penalized". If you do a little research you'll see that the exact same content can be found on several different website pages even on the first page results from Google. You should be able to create content different from your competitors - if it's specifications then add a unique review or benefits and advantages of certain features.
The first web page to be crawled\indexed by Google gets the most value for unique content, period. You example is useless, of course you can do a long tail search and find tons of sites with the same content, because you are specifically looking for those long tails. Now tone those down to competitive keywords and bet only one site shows in the results.
If you take it down to competitive keywords then there are most likely more elements at play than content alone. I do agree with your indexing comment - it's a new site so the content is most likely already indexed by Google from his competitors site. If a new site and an authority site placed content up on the same day or within a few days the authority site would likely win because it gets crawled frequently. Thanks for the correction!
Wrong - read below This is the right answer. Thanks Jaysonnhs. Even if you post unique content but a well established / authority website decide to copy your stuff, this website will be credited. It's not a matter of being first but rather a matter of having a higher trust rank.
What your trying to say is that "authority" sites could in a sense "copy all the content they want" from other sites (ex. trolling RSS feeds) and use it as their own content and get the value for for it, because they are crawled more frequently and trusted? That is just silly, since authority sites are crawled more often the chances are Google would find the content before it could be displayed on another web page off-site, period. The authority site "may" have a temporary boost in the SERPs but in a short amount of time they will go under the orignal source of the content, real world examples of this can be viewed all the time with news\media websites. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-recap-of-ses-san-jose-2006/
News and media websites don't have industry specific authority so I could see why they rank well first but then when the other elements come to play they lose their position. Hmmm I just did a check for an article we posted on our site that is not our original content and we rank better by 1 than the original site for the exact title search. I know the content was indexed on the other site before ours because we took it when we first started the website. I think it's because the other site isn't as big of an authority on "subject" as we are but I could be wrong. This could be a fluke but??