Module 1 Day 5: Understanding SEO Competition and Finding Little Kids to Beat Up

Well behind on updating this so I am really grateful that The Challenge 2010 is running at a slower pace with breaks in between. The effort of understanding the nature of competition on the Internet, to me, has got to be the most important and effective time spent in this whole process, so I have spent a while here and getting used to pulling and studying niches in Market Samurai.

Now in actual fact I have gone through the whole of module 1 as I write this, probably over 500 times, though I will explain more in a later blog, I just need to catch up with reporting back. I would say if you ever get bored in The Challenge and looking for something useful to do then this whole module is great to revisit. Learning and keeping up to date with it will never be a waste of time and it is always worth investigating the reasons why you are doing each part of the process.

The reference to the suspect title of beating up little kids was a term meant in a harmless way by Ed Dale in the introduction to this module, but the obvious political incorrectness made me laugh when I heard him explain it in more innocent terms of your competition.

Right let’s go an pick on someone smaller. As we get more skilled and confident we can start picking on the bigger kids. Personally, I have a few big kids already in my site and Market Samurai is perfect for uncovering their activity – more on that later.

So specifically here we look at the number of kids in your proposed playground and how big they are. You are out to be king of the playground and need to see who you can beat up easily. A few big ones may come up in the results, but really they are only there in reputation but the ones to look out for are the ones who are big and working hard to dominate the playing field. I shall leave any more analogies for this until the next module, where it comes to identifying them.

The only real actions for today was to make a list of the keywords that you will use in your niche and getting used to switching columns on and off in Market Samurai. Though before I would examine all the of data that came back from the SEO competition module in Market Samurai I must admit for speed when researching loads of different niches switching off what you didn’t really need was good for both the speed at which you got you data and the how fast you could decide whether to go ahead or not.

The five key factors are:-

  • Page Rank (PR)
  • Page Backlinks (BLP)
  • Yahoo Directory listing (YAH)
  • Keyword in Title (Title)
  • Keyword in URL (URL)

It was good to see these pointed out as the priority ones. Prior to this I would spend loads of time weighing up all of them and wondering what criteria I should take more notice of. Sometimes just leaving niches when looking at loads of old domains dominating, a factor I see they haven’t included.

The story about the lion and the two Internet marketers gives me a great idea. I leave it to anyone reading this which two Internet marketers they would like to run for their lives from the lion and which one would probably win. Sorry, no bets allowed on the lion.

Here’s my round up of related Challenge Blogs for this module. I do update these now and again just to see how everyone is getting on:

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