Understanding why they are ranking high

If some other page is outranking you, it will be easier to outrank them if you understand why they are ranking as high as they are. It is pretty easy to look at their page and get a quick sense of how relevant the content is and how good the information is. If their information is presented in a better way than yours, then maybe you should consider redesigning yours. If their page has more text on it, then maybe you should put more text on yours that more thoroughly describes the material. You could add additional photos or other forms of media like video and audio.

What would your site visitor want to see? Put yourself in their shoes. Make it desirable to visitors and chances are it will also be desirable to the search engines. Do not overuse flash on a website though. The search engines aren’t very good with flash. Even though the site may look great, the pages are probably not search engine friendly.

Look at the links that point back to your competitor’s web page. Where do these links come from? Are they from other industry related websites? What words are used in the anchor text? What is the single best link they have pointing to the page? Is there anywhere that you can get an even better one than that?

These are the types of things you need to figure out, if you really want to know how to outrank them. If you are just slightly better than the guy on top, your page will soon move up there. Remember, you don’t need to have the best page on the internet. You only need to have a page that is better than your competition. Look at it this way.  Imagine you and another guy are in the African Safari running from a lion that wants to eat you.  You don’t need to outrun the lion. You just need to outrun the guy next to you.

Figure out how to be one step better than your competition and you will have figured out how to get your web page ranked number one in Google.

Source: Thad