There is nothing more frustrating, when it comes to SEO, than slaving over your site in an attempt to get it up the ranks of the search engines, only to find that your competition for those keywords is King Kong. This has nothing to do with how many competing sites, which is something marketers concern themselves too much with, but how strong the top sites are. This article is going to give you some guidelines in dealing with this problem.

Okay, so what ARE you looking for? If you’re going to go up against the big guns for a keyword phrase, how big is too big? Well, everybody has their own idea about this. There is no right or wrong. I can only tell you what I have found to be true from my own experience in taking on the big guns. Naturally, your mileage will vary so test these numbers for yourself.

First thing I look at, even though Google says it’s not as big an issue as it was, is page rank. I am still seeing, whether this is a coincidence or not, that the top sites USUALLY have very high PRs. Naturally, this will vary from niche to niche and keyword to keyword. However, I have found that if a top site for a keyword has lower than a PR 4, I have a decent chance of knocking it off its pedestal. Don’t get me wrong. It will take some doing, but it is possible.

Next thing I look at is backlinks. This is a little harder to gauge depending on how quickly you are able to generate them to your own site. Now, backlinks really cover a broad range of numbers. The other day I was researching a site in a very competitive niche that had over 4 million backlinks. I certainly wouldn’t want to go up against that baby unless I had some big guns behind me.

Okay, so what IS a workable number for backlinks? I have found that if I tackle sites that have fewer than 50,000 backlinks, I stand a pretty good chance of knocking them off. However, you can’t just look at the top site. See, most search engine users who are not marketers will leave their browsers at the default and get about 10 sites per page. Most people won’t go beyond page two, if that. However, that means that if you can even just beat out site number 10, you can get on page one.

Think that’s not big? Trust me…it is. You don’t have to be the top site to get hits.

What you need, once you get on page one, is a killer description for your site. And that is handled through proper SEO of your description tag. Most web site owners don’t really understand SEO and their site descriptions are horrible. By making sure that YOURS is on the money, you WILL get your share of visitors.

Anyway, there you have it. How to scope out your competition and figure out if they’re worth tackling or not.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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