Learn from Your Competition to Get Higher Page Ranks

In order to have a website that is able to rank high in the search engines, it is important to do everything possible to optimize your website both within your site, and outside of it. Strategies to improve from within include your content, constant updates and keyword selection, while off-page strategies focus in the creation of links in other pages coming to your website.

In order to know how effective your keywords are, then it is important to pay close attention to your competitors. You can easily find your top competitors by writing the keywords you want your site to rank in a search engine, and look at the top results. You need then to learn what have they done in order to be on the top 3 on the most popular search engines; by doing so, you will be learning what it takes to be the number one.

There are several things you have to look for in your competition. Back links are one of the most important factors in determining your page rank as well as your competitor's. The most important factor here however, is the quality and not quantity of the websites that have links pointing to your website, and the anchor text surrounding your links is almost as important.

A good method to know how your competition is doing in terms of back links is to use Yahoo. By typing "link:" followed by your competition's domain in the search bar with the www. and the .com, org, info or whatever extension, you will get an approximate number of the back links pointing to that site. This number will give you an estimate of the number of the back links that this particular website has, so you will know how many links will need to out rank them.

Knowing the keywords or key phrase that your competition has anchored to their links is also important to improve yours. The key phrase is the text in which the link is places, usually is blue an underlined, and you need to make sure they are strong o make people click them and visit your website. To know the websites that have the most anchor links for the key phrase you want to investigate, simply go to Google and type "allinanchor:" before the key phrase.

These are only two things you can do to see how your competitions is doing. There is no guarantee that doing the same in these two aspects only will rank you in the top because there are other factors to consider such as the quality f your content and the size of your website, but it will give you an idea of some of the things you need to improve to rank higher.