Another quick SEO question..

[jamel]

hi
A quick question but when looking at your top 3 competition for certain long tail keywords how does it stand for me getting to top 3 if the top three results are from ehow, ezines,articlebase,youtube…iether all of them or some…how do you beat them? can you beat say an article? or is it just a leave alone area then? thank you for your great posts still reading…:)

[TraciKnoppe]

What you want to look for is how many backlinks does that particular article have. Go to http://www.yahoo.com and enter this is the search field:

link:http://ezinearticles.com/full-url-to-the-specific-article

Then select from the Show inlinks dropdown, 'except from this domain'

Then look through the links and if you see multiple links point to this article, all from the same main domain, those only count as one backlink. So even if the result shows 20 backlinks and 10 of those are all from different pages within http://www.abc.com those links only count as one backlink.

This will give you a good idea as to how many backlinks are pointing specifically to this article. It's this individual article's ranking you're trying to beat, not all of ezinearticles.com home page.

[jamel]

oh ok I knew about checking backlinks but did not know 100% how to do take the results if its an article etc but I get it now big thanks! I assume though when looking at the top three/five results it is always the exact phrase that matters because if its a long tail keyword I have found I will always put it in "between" so I see my competition for the exact keywords is that correct?
I will if it's out there look at the keywords without "" but always check after the exact phrase..

[AlexNewell]

There's no certain way of sizing up the competition!

You can
(1) look at the top sites and check their PageRank - if it is $ and above you have a pile of work to do
(2) count backlinks - fact is tho that plenty of sites in top spots do not have many links to the page
(3) check to see if there's any web 20 sites -where other people have put ezinearticles, squidoo, hubs etc you can too

It is a judgment call

Good luck!