Competition Analysis

[entrep35]

Hi Lynn,

I read your article on Creating Affiliates Sites (Part II). The part about analyzing the competition is still not clear to me as I am not sure how to determine if there is too much competition? What questions should I ask myself to see if a particular affiliate project is worth pursuing? What does backward links tell me about my competition? It seems that the more backward links I have the better for higher page ranking in the search engines but it seems that's a gradual process, meaning that's something I will be working on to obtain? Do you have any other recent articles (with a more recent example) on this topic? Thank you!

[Lynn Terry]

This post: Keywords & Phrases (http://www.clicknewz.com/2077/seo-content-choosing-keywords-phrases/) - and the backlink checking tutorial early on in the comments - might help answer your questions. Longtail keyword phrases are fairly easy to rank well for, so I like to choose niches with a lot of depth (which equals a lot of longtail).

You need more backlinks than the top results have, to get a better position than them. That is in addition to your good content and on-page optimization of course.

If the #3 spot has 10 decent links, you can beat them out of that spot with 10 better links. I always look at that and shoot for 15-20 really high quality inbound links to my page to make it to that spot and push them down.