My main competiton is a blog that has not been updated in almost a year, they currently rank #1 for "hookah reviews" but their site has nothing really on it. I rank around #7 for the same keyword, but my site is only 3 weeks old. How can I outrank a dead website?
Just like you would do with a regular competitor: Keep on building links. Another thing you could try is look at his backlinks and ask the owners of the site to change the links to yours, because your website is more up to date.
Competing with dead blog is very easy, keep adding original content and backlink, sooner or later you will win. try backlinkwatch.com or Seospyglass tool.
Keep your blog updates, build links for that keyword. Sooner or later, you'll be able to outrank that.
it's kind of odd because when i do a search for "hookah reviews" the number one site is dead and the worst part is the site has no monotization, nothing to make money from? The only difference i see is the numbe 7 site does not have the keyword in the site name. It looks like the first site will be easy to overcome but there's the odd chance they are still working on backlinks. The next few sites look to be built very well. So, it will take work but you can do it.
The #1 site, www.hookahreviews.com, is my main competition for ranking, the site is dead and has no ads, it's strange. My site is www.hookahreviews.net.
See if the owner of that dead blog would sell it to you just to get if off his hands. Couldn't hurt to ask!
Just like the first reply says; you would do the same thing as if your competing with a regular blog. Build backlinks, use SEO tools to help you rank up.
I think your competitor's blog has many backlinks and from relevant places. So the blog still ranked one. Continue your link building. You will beat him in future.
Check backlinks with http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/ ... they have good progs to start with.
Looks like they have a good amount of backlinks, I am working on building more and working on my SERP rankings, I moved up to #4 for my main keyword "hookah reviews" but still on the 2nd page for "shisha reviews" any suggestions?
I would suggest you to add fresh content and of course back links from high PR sites. Article writing will be helpful too.
A lot of US people spell hookah as hooka, FYI. Try ranking for that keyword first and hookah will come naturally in your rankings.
I checked my analytics, I only have 20 hits from the keyword hookah, so maybe I should put that in my meta keywords?
Actually if you will check and analyze, for a month or two, the site or a blog that your competing may go down coz' like you've said, it's a dead blog after all. What you need to do is to continue posting about your niche and you will see the results after a month or two. Of course ranking is not only for URL keywording, it's about how you handle your content and also the off page optimization of your site (also it depends if it's a quality links or not).