Lets face it, sometimes as much as you do to promote and market your website online, there are STILL websites ranking better than yours! You might ask yourself how could this be, after all the time and energy you have put into website promotion? Well the chances are that as much as what you do online to promote your website, so your competitors are doing the same, if not more than you, especially if they have bigger budgets, more manpower or if they are just plain smarter than you.

Why not then stop looking so hard at your own website, and look harder at your competitors. I will assume that you have similar information, services or products on your sites, and that everyones sites are properly ‘optimized’.

Step 1 – Check the code

What I like to do first of all, is look at the source of my main competitors website, so that I can get an idea of how their site works. To view the source of the web page, right click and choose ‘view source’ from the popup menu. Take a look at the Meta tags in the website, particularly the title, keywords and description tags. This should give you an idea of the keywords and phrases they are targeting in the search engines, check that its the same as you thought, ie, the same that you are targeting. Normally its the first words in each of those tags.

Bear in mind that if they are doing things well, each page in the site will have different meta tags, so as to target a different keyphrase. Ideally you should be doing this, targeting a different phrase with every page.

For now, stick to the home page of the website. You might be able to also see information such as who designed or is marketing their site, sometimes designers and marketers like to leave a signature with a url to their own website. Assuming you are able to guess what their primary key phrase is that they are targeting, go through the rest of the code on the page, keeping a lookout for everywhere that text appears. Everytime you see a new place with the key phrase, think if you could or should do that on your site too.

Step 2 Check how much google likes the competition

Now that you have a pretty good idea of what the competitors site looks like naked, its time to check why they rank better than you for your keyphrase. Firstly check their google page rank as opposed to yours. This could be a major factor as to why they rank better, obviously if the competitors PR is 5 and yours is 1, then you have a problem! If you have the google toolbar installed, you should be able to see the pagerank instantly, alternatively, you could use a website like www.pagerank.com or similar. If both your sites have the same PR, then its going to be a whole lot easier to nudge past them in search results. If they DO have a much better PR, then you need to take steps to improve yours, you can begin by following the other steps in this guide.

Step 3 – Check who links to your competitors

I like to use a website called www.widexl.com to check who is linking to a competitor website, or basically, link popularity. Widexl allows you to enter 3 different urls to check at the same time. The link popularity script can be found here http://www.widexl.com/remote/link-popularity/index.html. Put your own url, and two of your top competitor websites into the search. You will get shown a table displaying how many links are on record to all the websites, from each of the major search engines. Are your competitors way ahead of you? Are you about even? What you do now, is click on the actual figure of sites that Yahoo or Google etc have for one of your competitors. This will bring up a search window from that engine, with all the urls that link to your competition. You could do this manually by searching for link:www.domain.com in a search engine.

Take a look at the list, open each page up, one by one, and see if its not possible for you to also list your website on that page. Having more links to your website DOES have an affect on your website’s PR. Many of the pages that list your competitors url will be directories, search engines, links pages, forums, blogs etc. Try to join or participate in as many of these same places as possible, and add your url too. While you are at it, it might give you ideas of similar websites where you can add your link, or become a member. The chances are that this step will help you to add a load of new links pointing to your website.

Step 4 – Leveling the playing field

OK, so you know the competition has lots of links pointing to them, but now so do you, because you have just raided their link list, and added your own site to as many of those same places as possible. These new places, along with the links you already had pointing to your website, should help with your attack on their website positioning.
Now to try a little of what I call ‘reverse search engine optimization’. I am not sure what the ‘real’ name for it would be.

You dont know what exactly google and other engines want, all you do know, is that they like the competition website more than yours. So by that idea, its possible to think that they are more correct in offering what the search engines like for that keyphrase, than what your website is. So if you bring your website into alignment with what they have in terms of content and relevancy to the keyphrase you are both targeting, then you should be able to make the jump past their website in the rankings.

What you are going to do, is measure your own website against your competitors. Forget links and pagerank, we are only thinking content for this one. Using Widexl again, this time use the meta tag analyzer script (http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html)

Check your own site’s keyword information, then check your competitors. Try and get your own website closer to what your competitors percentage is, by bringing it into alignment for relevancy to page content for the Title, Description and Keywords.

The theory is that if your site is equal or very close to your competitors, then you should rank equal or close to their website. So now, your page that you are editing should be very close to your competitors, not in necessarily in word for word content, but in terms of what google is ranking that page for, percentage wise.

I know this is a roundabout way of doing things, and I have had success with this method. I am not sure if it is the absolute correct way of doing things, but hell, the only way to know that would be to know the search engine formulas. Its just one of many different ways of getting a result.