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Hi Guys,

Some iv been learning alot about SEO but some basic ideas and questions im still finding hard to get information on!

Now lets say I have a shoe shop website and Im number 2 for that search term and another website is number 1. Is there any method to discover how much work I will need to do to become number 1 for this search term? In other words I would like to see how many back links my competitor has versus how many I have to become number one!

Nick
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Short answer - there is no easy answer - if there was, we'd all be doing it
There are a LOT of different factors that contribute to a site's rank in search - links are only one of them
 

seanpearse

New Member
As blacknight said Google takes many factors into consideration in it's new ranking algo but a tool I use to check some out competition is Market Samurai. You can download a 40 day trial here , enter the name Ed Dale when asked how did you hear about this trial. It gives you a breakdown of competitors backlinks, page rank, age of domain, keywords in title, keywords in H1 tags, whether they're dmoz or Yahoo! registered etc. all of which are important ranking factors.
 

tiyerl

New Member
Make sure your on-page SEO has your keywords in it especially H1 , H2 and the first P. Article submission is a good way of getting good quality back links that may mature in page rank over time. I have also bought the paid version of market samurai, so far i haven't used it to the maximum yet, so i dunno if it is wroth the money or not.
 

jkeyes

New Member
davidbrett's comment prompted me to share the following from Matt Gemmell's excellent SEO for Non-dicks post:

Good SEO is a by-product of not being a dick on the internet.

The value of your content will never entirely go away, but much more importantly your trustworthiness will only increase over time.

Stop wilfully conflating optimisation with being a slimy liar. Stop being a dick on the internet. Write something interesting, and keep doing it for months and years. SEO will then follow naturally.
 

chicagorox

New Member
Of course there are ways to find out how much work you will need to put in, it just becomes exponentially more difficult to monitor your competitor's efforts as the competition and the number of back links increase. If you are talking about an uncompetitive keyword, a simple "info" or "site" search on google could tell you what the #1 spot has done and what you should do to catch up, although time is still a factor as it may take some to get google to index you.
 

bjd461

New Member
You mention "I would like to see how many back links my competitor has versus how many I have".
The fact is you can not - Google never reveals the tue number of a sites backlinks to anyone except the sites owner.
You can see your own using webmaster tools.
You can see estimates of those of other sites (and your own) using various programs (example quick and easy one backlinkwatch.com), but these are never exact counts.*
Still its ok to look using these methods, it gives you an idea of what to aim for.
Hopes this helps
 
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