Say you are trying to rank for the word "blah". But someone already owns blah.com and they have the number 1 spot on Google. How hard is it to knock them off?
I dont know. Let me give you a more detailed description. I live in naples florida. Now, we will call my niche 'blah'. So, right now I'm ranking top 10 on Google for the keyword 'blah' yet I can't take the number one spot for the keyword "naples blah". One ovt is over 50,000,000, the naples one is like 1.4million. Yet I still cant take that #1 spot.
Ok, after deeper look - they have backlinks from w3.org and the other strong sites... that would be not easy to beat.
there is no magic formula. techniques to improve rankings are known, if he has a small advantage in just one parameter (url) you can compensate that by having more relevent links... @grg he did not give the keyword he is targetting
Ok, I've got it know , but then it is hard to speak about something we don't know. Every case is different.
It will be pretty difficult, but it can be done. The point is to make sure your on-page and backlink keywords are just as strong as theirs. Have more backlinks coming in than they do, and also increase the content on your site, so that you have more better-quality-than-they content. It will still take awhile, but if you do those things, it'll happen.
It can be done, although it would be alot more harder, the reasons for this is because if someone links to blah.com and then links to your site gamesontop.com then the person would probably use "blah" in the anchor text for blah.com and for you "games on top" would be the anchor text or "gamesontop", plus they also have that little advantage and every advantage adds up when it comes to doing SEO.
It's becoming a real pain in the ass. I have managed to lock down the national SERPS, yet I can get the #1's for local SERPS. Very annoying.
Having the keyword.com domain is not in and of itself a significant advantage. Google does not view that particular combination as being more authoritative than any other. However, there are some things to look at if it is a competitive keyword: a) They might have bought it before the keyword became competitive and/or the web became crowded. If so, then they would have a major domain age boost over you. b) They might have bought the domain from someone else. With competitive domains, this probably means that they have money. If they spent a bunch on the actual domain name, it's a pretty safe bet that they reserved a nice chunk of change for SEO'ing the site as well. c) All links that are URL-only will also inherently carry the keyword in it, and it is quite a bit easier to get URL-only links to your website than it is to get ones with the exact anchor text you need, especially from authority sources. -Michael
have you analysed both sites and looked for a ommon difference between the two? Maybe naples blah has better content, better naples blah backlinks. Much Older site perhaps? I'm sure you'll get that number one spot eventualy!
I have done that, the naples blah has NOTHING. The national companies I beat are multi-million dollar companies. I just don't know what the deal is. =[
It can be really difficult. If you do a search for "virtual office" you will see virtualoffice.com, it has taken us yourcityoffice.com a while to rank better than them out of "220,000,000" results. There site has not been changed or updated for around 3 years and have been out of business for this long and has nothing to do with a Virtual Office. google still gives these clowns a decent position and google said they would do their best to get rid of domain hoggers such as this but they have done nothing. I am begining to think that if we just bought virtualoffice-x.com virtualoffice-y.com virtualoffice-z.com and spam the hell out of the search engines then we can start to ruin it for everyone. With a little bit of hard work we could all ruin our competitors sites and search results and force google to get its act together! After all, we spend so much money on adwords as a community and deserve some justice dont you think?
You need to work hard for it. Try to get more quality and related backlinks. Link to trusted sites. Get more backlinks using your targeted keywords as anchor text.