SEO Firm | Search Engine Optimization Tips & Advice

The SEO Playing Field: The Competition

The second thing that you must know when preparing to optimize a website for the search engines is to know the competition.

Since I have already mentioned this in a previous page, including the desire to locate niche terms instead of going brute force after the most frequently typed terms, I will turn to a few specifics regarding the quantity and quality of competition with relation to search engines.

SEO Competition in Google

With 70% of Internet searches being performed on Google or on one of the sites which use the Google engine to return results (e.g. AOL), the competition on Google for the top terms is fierce. Add to that the fact that Google favors quality one-way links from different IP addresses and different domain owners on pages with similar subject matter, and that these links need to sit on a site for a time before they really count in the Google algorithm, and you can start to see that nobody moves up the ladder very quickly in Google. Those at the top are very hard to unseat. They got there because of a slow steady progression and lots of diligence and hard work. Find niche terms, if at all possible, if you need to get the Google traffic quickly.

SEO Competition in Yahoo

Yahoo favors a quantity of links, so unseating the top players often requires having more links than they have. If you can get these quickly, which, more often than not, requires throwing money at the problem, then you can move into the top ranks more quickly. If you want to do it the old fashioned way, since this is the best policy for Google or because of a lack of funds, it might require you to spend hours upon hours to gain the thousands of links required to get onto the front page of Yahoo for the more highly searched terms.

SEO Competition in MSN

MSN is the easiest place to face the competition. New players often have just as much of a chance as the old duffers to rise to the top. The number of people linking to your site is starting to inch its way into the algorithm, but so far content rules.

Of course, the people on MSN might not be searching for your product or service, which leads us into examining the next subject: the Clients Demographics.