Hi, I am trying to analyze competition for a couple keywords, and have a quick question... I found out that for a couple keyword phrases, there are NO sites that have both the keyword in their title tags and the keyword in an anchor text in an inbound link somewhere. (Although there are some that does one or the other.) Does that mean I have a good chance of ranking #1 if I just did those two things? Or would other factors (PR, age of site, number of links that contain OTHER anchor text, etc.) outweigh it? (Because the current competition does have high PR and lots of inbound links -- they just don't seem SEO'd for this specific phrase...) Thanks in advance for your thoughts! Liz
For Google the anchor text weighs heavily. So even though the page doesn't have the keyword in the page title it will still rank if it has it anywhere in the text and then a lot of links back to the page with the same keyword. Of course, the title, description, and h1 tags carry more weight than the page text so the other site would benefit by getting the keywords in them. For you, I'd start by trying to determine how many links (with PR and relevance) the other site has with the anchor text. If you think you can get roughly the same number and type then you should be able to beat them by getting your on page SEO right. Good luck...and let us know how it turns out.
Hi, Thanks so much for your response! The other sites not only don't have the keyword in their title, but they don't have them in their text OR anchor text either! Does this mean if I just got a few links with the appropriate anchor text, and had the keyword in my title and text, I would outrank them for this particular keyword?
The go after them. Remember, the competition is only the Top 10 SERPs for that keyword. No one else. Focus on the following and in this order. Keyword use in document title Global link popularity of web site Link texts of inbound links Keyword use in body text Age of web site Keyword use in H1 headline texts Keyword use in domain name Keyword use in IMG ALT attributes For more detail, try open-site.org/ Computers/ Internet/ Promotion And don't over use the keywords. If they use the keyword phrase once. You use it only once. It is very simple, if they did it, then you can do it.
Thanks for your response, Jim! Can you explain a little more about what you mean by "Global link popularity of the site"? Also, in your opinion (with all other things being equal), I could outrank them for that keyword phrase if I used that anchor text (since they haven't used it in anchor at all) or will the fact that they have more links (albeit without the anchor text for this keyword) prevent that?