I have a client's website ranked on the first page, but we are trying to beat out a competitor who is always ranked right above us in a very tough niche. Every week though, we leapfrog over him and it stays there for about six to teh hours, and then he leaps back over us. It's like we're always in a dogfight and he comes out winning. Just wondering if you guys experience this w/ your competitors - and if so, what course of action did you take to eventually beat your competitor.
Yes I've had this experience but it's useful if you ask me. Competition will make you work harder and in the end you'll see more good results. Dont' let him win! Keep it up
Just keep cool head, that's the best way to avoid hot water and stay out of penalty. I've seen many webmasters crossing the threshold in this situation. Remember, that even if you run out of link building ideas, you can always better your competitor by having more fresh content and making sure your onsite optimization is spotless! It is something that you control 100%.
I've never been in your shoes but I think if you create more back links from heavy websites such as ezinearticles, squidoo, hubpages, wetpaint, googleknol, etc etc. targeting your keywords it could help you to stay up front longer and eventually permanently... hopefully! Good luck!
Do NOT resort to blackhat tactics to get an edge. That's a piece of advice I can pass along to you from the mistakes I have seen made. It's not until they get de-listed that they end up hiring me to fix their mistakes Stick with whitehat methods, and think long-term, not short-term. veros makes a great point about ezinearticles, squidoo, etc. - These are long-term tactics. Without getting into specifics, what type of business are you in?
There are blackhat ways to knock your competition out of the way. But the only real way to do it is to be better then them. Build backlinks with your targeted keyword in the link. Make sure you have submitted a site map to your google webmaster tools. Keep your site updated on a regular basis with quality content that is also original. Use the google link: command to see who is linking to that other site. Go to the linking site and ask them to add a link to your site. One factor is page rank, which is how many incoming links you have. Google uses PR to measure how popular a site is. Its also used to place your site in the results pages. The more inbound links a site has, the more authority it has, the better its supposed to rank. Limit outbound links - too many outbound links can hurt your site. There should be more incoming links then outbound links. So check into that.