Why Does My Competitor’s Website Rank Higher?

Websites are indexed by web bots, the information gets sent back to the company where powerful indexing algorithms are running to rank your site amongst the trillion other sites. For a quick overview I am going to show you some of the main factors of how and why you get ranked. I am not going into every little metric of this but will give you a high level review. I am planning to write complete articles focusing on each topic very soon.

Keywords used in Title of page

Your web page title currently looks like: Intertain Designs – Services
A more optimized way to write your page title: Services Provided by Intertain

On the page give a brief summary of each service linking to pages for each service.

Web Development Services | Intertain Designs
—  CMS Development for Ektron | Intertain Designs
——-  Template Design for Ektron | Intertain Designs

Make sure your page title text is used as your main heading on your page. It does not have to be exact.

If your page title is: Template Design for Ektron | Intertain Designs

Your page title needs to include the keywords Template Design for Ektron

Your main heading on your page could be: Ektron Template Design

Most of the time if your page title is correctly formatted you can use the page title as your main heading for the page’s content. There is nothing wrong with using of minor variations of: Template Design for Ektron, Templates Designed for Ektron

Things to keep in mind when planning your page titles:

• Google only displays 66 characters including whitespace in its results. Use a word processor and use the word count feature, ms word lets you see the amount of characters used.
• Do a little keyword research and plan who you’re going to target.
• Template Design is a lot different then Template Design for Ektron

Age of Site

This metric is all about credibility and trust. The age of site or domain really has more of an effect when a domain is less then a year or 2 old. Nothing you can do but keep and clean record and let the time pass to improve this metric. If your domain’s content was targeting music then a year later you change your site to focus on books. This will dramatically affect your site’s credibility.

Best thing to do is make your site, target your audience, create a link building plan, and stick to your guns.

Keyword Use in Body Content

Keyword Use in sites content is one of the most important aspects to creating organic Search Engine Result Page (SERP) rankings. If you remember about 8 years ago when some sites used to put a lot of white text on a white background usually at the bottom of a page. This is referred to as keyword stuffing. What they were doing was a super messy way of trying to bring more traffic.

We still do it today to a certain extent, except now it is done in the form of using a certain number of keywords in body copy so its represents 3% of all the copy. This is referred to as Keyword Weight. The other factor is Keyword Prominence; this is where your keywords first appear in the copy. These two measurements are a search engines way of making sure your content is real content and not just words stacked next to each other 200 times. Remember quality over quantity. In the age of things like social media word of mouth on the web goes along way. Especially when you’re in a market like gaming, where the website market is flooded with site owners competing vigorously for the same topics.

Bottom line put some thought into your content and who you are targeting.

 

This is part 1 of 3. Part 2 is coming in a week.

One Response to “Why Does My Competitor’s Website Rank Higher?”

1. zeus says:

   March 29, 2009 at 9:31 am

   Good stuff man, I think alot of people are really clueless on what it really takes to rank higher, it isn’t a secret formula, you just need solid unique content. Looking forward to more tips and advice in the upcoming weeks.