Although most of you out there aware on analyzing your competition, 99% ignore this stage. Kindly be aware that this is one of the most crucial aspects that you should never miss out! We need to analyse the amount of appropriate resources and time it could potentially get our main keyword to #1. We should take into consideration the important factors of the top 5 ranking websites/blogs for your keyword and check whether it’s an appropriate decision to compete with those website/blogs for the specific keyword. Following are the most important factors that you need to take into consideration to decide whether it’s profitable and worthwhile to compete with other websites/blogs for the specific keyword. 1. Age of Domain I have not only made serious observations but also did split testing to confirm whether aged domain ranked better compared to newer ones. It had been proven through my experiment that domain age plays a vital role on ranking better. Most of the webmasters and website owners tend to confuse with the domain age and content age. Fresh contents always rank better than older contents. 2. Inbound links Inbound links had always been an important factor for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I’m pretty sure most of the self-proclaimed SEO Geeks out there will always concentrate on the quantity of incoming links rather than the quality of the links. SEO does not work in such way anymore! Quality and relevancy of an incoming link matters the most! 3. Page Authority If top quality sites are ranking because they are huge, page authority can prove to be better milestone compare to the domain authority. Maybe you’re thinking why I am talking about page authority and not domain authority! We are not competing against the whole site, only one page where you could check the page authority before giving up on competing with your desired keyword. Anything below 35 is a great indicator for us and OpenSiteExplorer Tool will be the most effective tool to check the page authority of a page ranking for certain keywords. 4. Root Domain Linking Getting massive link from just one domain is totally not natural and will be considered as spam. If your competitor is getting their links from few sites that will be a good indication for you to compete. All you need to focus is to get a lot of different websites linking to your website/blogs. Other than that, you should also concentrate on getting links from different platforms like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, wikis, forum boards and etc.