As we’ve just started “Keyword Ideas” of the Day series on Bloggers World, I thought it’d also make sense to write a brief tutorial to help bloggers understand how to identify their SEO competitor on Page 1 of Google and outrank them in matter of couple of weeks.
Now I know there’s a lot of apprehension about picking up keywords like “HTC Butterfly Price”, which i suggested under top Keyword Idea for Dec 10, and I understand that they’re probably little more apt for intermediate level bloggers, and henceforth I’d post them on Blogging Plus and suggest only ultra low competition keywords on Bloggers World for the newbies.
So, I’m listing out the basic guidelines for ranking this specific keyword, though i’ll make a detailed tutorial to spy on your competitors backlinks using Ahrefs.com and publish it as a separate post shortly.
1. Step 1 – Identify the weakest url on Page 1 of Google that doesn’t have exact keyword in Title, URL & Meta Desc
In this case, I see NDTV has 2 pages ranking, out of which, 2nd one highlighted in picture is a partial match, and can be targeted easily, because they’re not trying to rank for HTC Butterfly Price but rather HTC Butterfly S.
Now this is purely my strategy and many established bloggers might second me on this, but then this is how i do the targeting, and I’ve outranked most of the big sites including the likes of Bentley.com Audi.com with my micro niche car blogs for several years, so i don’t see any reason why this strategy wont work for gadgets, but I’m yet to do it with NDTV, so i’ll be doing that shortly on one of the posts on Geex.in, our new tech blog.
Next, you can put that URL in Ahrefs.com (note i’m using only trial version instead of full version of Ahrefs here)
I see that there are about 18 links pointing to this specific URL
Upon a quick drill-down i see that 2 of the links are dead, and i can easily build links from remaining 16 sources in a matter of 1 hour, and probably get 3-4 more.
I recommend you to build at least 1-2 strong profile links – you can read our other guide on “How to Create Strong Profile Links for SEO” where I’ve explained about exploiting platforms like Orcid.org with even target anchor texts and post links.
I’ll shortly create another post with guidelines on crafting an SEO-friendly post to outrank competing pages, but as of now, you need to follow the basics like
– Using the keyword in title, first 20 words, last para, and at least 2 more times in the body
– Crafting a good 1000+ worder post, which has more info than your competitor page
– Ensuring that all guidelines of SEO Yoast are followed so that all dots appear green in Yoast
– Creating 1-2 outbound links to authority sites, but NOT your competitor (like NDTV in this example)
– Creating 1-2 in-bound links to your post from other pages of your blog
– Using keyword as slug of URL of your post
– Using keyword as tag in WordPress and alt tag for images
– Tagging your post to ONLY one appropriate category
Once you publish it, share it on FB, Tweet the link, G+, and submit on 3-4 bookmarking sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and then create 5 Web 2.0 on
– Blogetery
– Tumblr
– Blogspot.co.uk
– WordPress.com
– Hubpages
Quickly spin & edit a post & submit it to ArticlesBase.com or SooperArticles or Amazines.com with target anchor text.
Go ahead and drop 4-5 manual blog comments, register on a relevant forum, and drop a link
Lastly, ensure that you drop your link one of the Quora threads, and Yahoo Answers, and boom you should see your rankings shooting up within couple of weeks.
If you still get stuck on page 2, and don’t make it to page 1, then you’ll need to probably get 3-4 powerful contextual links, but ensure that you don’t build all 20 backlinks with anchor text as keyword, otherwise you’d be asking for trouble.
If you still face issues, feel free to drop a comment here and I’ll try to help you out!
Moreover, if you’re trying to rank for this keyword, and need an extra link, feel free to drop me a line, and i’ll also link your blog post in this case study! 😉