Your Competitor's Most Powerful SEO Strategies

What SEO strategies and tactics are your competitors using to defeat you in the rankings?

Your Competitor's Most Powerful SEO Strategies
Written by Titus Hoskins

If you're competing against some powerful companies/sites in very lucrative niche markets you better quickly learn your competitor's SEO tactics and strategies, if you truly want to compete with the big boys. However, what you really discover or uncover might leave you with a sour taste in your mouth. In actual fact, you may just have to wash your mouth out with soap, after you verbally react to how some of your competitors are beating you in the search engines.

All joking aside and it could just be me, but search engine competition on the web is becoming even more nastier as the competition heats up and the amount of online commerce has increased. So I thought it would prove helpful to you if I listed some of the major SEO strategies my major competitors are utilizing. Your competitors are probably using many of the same tactics against you.

But let's not become too cynical, most webmasters and marketers are playing by the rules and offering solid content which their visitors desire and want. Most are playing by strictly "White Hat" rules and are very ethical in their tactics. Even Post Panda, building a well structured theme focused and easy-to-navigate site, which loads quickly and satisfies the search query will still be your best all-around SEO strategy.

However, you will find many bending the rules and straying into those "Grey" areas which are somewhat questionable, but none the less, effective marketing tactics, despite whatever algorithmic changes the search engines make. Even more troubling, many of your competitors may be "gaming" the system in order to get those all important top SERPs placements.

Please keep in mind, I do not endorse or even approve of some of these SEO methods, but you should be aware that your competitors may be using them to dominate your niche market or your targeted keyword phrases. Also, I am mainly talking about your competitors ranking highly in Google, but these strategies can also be applied to the other search engines as well.

So here are some powerful and effective SEO strategies your competitors may be using against you or your sites:

1. Multiple Site Building & Linking

This has always been one of the most effective SEO tactics on the web. Don't just build one site in your niche, build numerous sites and link them all together. Instead of building one original site in your market, build 3, 4 or more highly original but related sites, which all rank for the keywords in your niche. You probably already know this is one of the key strategies to SEO success on the web. And we are not talking about building countless spammy websites here, but legitimate sites which have their own content and links. Quality sites which do merit their rankings in the search engines, more or less, if you discount this site clustering.

In many of my niches, I regularly see major competitors who have four or five sites listed on the first page of Google for some very lucrative keywords. Sometimes, you may have to do some heavy keyword research and some lengthy study of the linking structures to discover the connections, but in many cases, these connected sites will be very obvious to you. For example, in one of my niches, the marketer or company simply uses the same site format and design with over 6 or 7 sites - you don't even have to do a "Whois" search to find out that all these belong to the same company and they're boosting their rankings in all sites by linking them together.

Other marketers might not be so obvious and use proxy listings to hide their connections and it may be difficult or impossible to discover their true ownership. This is an effective SEO and marketing strategy you should be aware of and one which your most successful competitors may be using. Remember, you can simply use Yahoo Site Explorer to examine the linking structures of your competitor's site or sites.

2. Link Buying

Despite Google's crackdown on link buying, it is still one of the most effective SEO strategies on the web, especially if you have deep pockets and keep your link buying to highly ranked keyword related content. I see my major competition doing this regularly and many times it is used in combination with the first tactic listed above because you can double/triple the effectiveness of this bought PageRank as it flows through closely grouped sites.

Of course, proving that a link is actually bought is extremely hard to do, but if your competitor has countless one-way links on the main index page of numerous sites... chances are your competitor is buying all those links and PageRank. Another red flag, your competitor has ONLY DoFollow links on thousands of sites and no NoFollow links, which is about as natural as orange hair, but Google doesn't seem to be penalizing these sites.

However, if Google believes you're selling links, they will penalize your site. Your competitors may even report your site to Google, even if you're not selling links, this can be a long and costly battle to prove you're not. In the meanwhile, your competition may be cleaning up in the rankings and in sales.

Another "grey" area seems to be the paid directory links. Many marketers argue the benefits of buying directory links such as the Yahoo Directory Listing, but it is a strategy you could consider, especially if you see that your competitors have paid listings in all these directories. And especially if those links have "human editors" which check for quality, most experts still believe Google likes those kinds of links more. Obviously, one way to compete, is to check all your competitor's links and go out and acquire all the same links for your site.

3. Exact Keyword Domains

Another very effective way your competitors may be beating you in the search engines, especially Google, is the usage of "exact keyword domains". Sometimes it may even be using the "product or company name" in the domain, which is usually not allowed for trademark reasons. However, in most cases, it's simply taking a long-tail keyword phrase and building a small mini-site around this phrase and/or product.

"How does it work?"

For example, if you discover that hundreds or even thousands are searching for say "productAcoupons" each month. You buy a domain entitled "productAcoupons.com" and build content and a site on productA. Google has really started to rank these exact domain matches on the first page, if not in the top spot. A simple, direct and highly effective SEO method.

4. Press Releases

Press releases are another form of link buying which your competitors may be using, especially if they have deep pockets. A press release will give you immediate traffic and can help build your long term links. If your competitors are using press releases to boost their rankings, you can always do the same. However, it can be very expensive, a release through PRweb will cost you anywhere from $200 to $400, depending on your placement.

When I use PRweb, I usually throw in a few extra bucks so that my release is featured in the top spots for that day. This makes my release much more visible and it gets picked up by more sites, boosting the overall SEO effectiveness of my release.

5. Authoritative Link Building

Of course, not everything is so devious or underhanded, most webmasters are playing by the rules and using good SEO tactics. Good solid SEO means you have good authoritative backlinks from quality sites. Some great sources for those kinds of links will be: Wiki sites like Wikipedia and online resources like Google Knol, Press Releases, Powerful .edu and .gov backlinks, Blog comments, DoFollow bookmarking sites, Testimonials with backlinks, Profile listings on free social sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace... all these kinds can be authoritative links will help boost your SEO presence and rankings. Remember to take advantage of any memberships you have in well known organizations and request a backlink. The same goes for university or college .edu Alumni Pages as these can prove very beneficial.

Link Bait - One of the most effective ways for building these quality authoritative one-way links is to use link bait. This can be a valuable resource or service which other webmasters and sites will want to link to in order to help their own visitors. Many things can be used as link bait: ecourses, videos, free ebooks, well-written content, slideshows, seo tools, and the list goes on. Keep in mind, videos, ebooks, slideshows... can all be embedded with links back to your site.

6. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking has become very important for SEO and your major competitors are probably using these sites to their best advantage. Make sure you are keeping up with all the latest social trends and have prominent bookmark buttons for such places as Twitter, FaceBook, Google Plus, Digg, Reddit... one common practice you see many webmasters and marketers using is the comprehensive AddThis button which lets your visitors share your content in over 300 social bookmarking sites/programs.

Any system can be abused and your competitors may be using bookmarking software to create thousands of profiles and bookmarks in the countless different social bookmark sites. Your competitors may also be buying bookmarks in all sites and manipulating the results in their favor. Thankfully, these SEO tactics only work in the short term until the search engines put rules into place to counteract this type of link spamming.

7. Google Bowling

You have probably heard of Google Bombing, where countless webmasters and sites invent a keyword phrase and link it to a particular site or person... i.e. miserable failure - George Bush. Well, there is another practice where countless spammy links pointing to your site are created by your competitors to lower your rankings in Google.

There is a lot of dispute whether or not there is any such thing as Google Bowling, since you have no control of who links to your site - these spammy links should not alter your rankings. But a few webmasters have reported and even tested this practice with their own sites to prove that it does indeed work, at least for low PageRank sites. Add the spammy links and your rankings go down a few spots, remove the links and your rankings go up. Some unscrupulous competitors could even buy countless spammy links and point them to your site.

Don't laugh, your competitors could be doing much worse underhand things to lower your rankings. If you believe they're all playing nice, then you're living in a dreamworld. And we haven't even touched on the whole area of someone hacking your site and placing links to undermine all your hard work...

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The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Marketing Tools If you liked the SEO tips above, why not try the Free 7 Day Copyright 2011 Titus Hoskins.