Article printed from SEO-News: http://www.seo-news.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.seo-news.com/archives.html

Google Optimization: Using Search Operators
By Jeffrey Smith (c) 2009

The underlying premise of SEO suggests that you understand the
task at hand when it comes to outranking the other 999 entrants
for any given keyword.

Google stops indexing a particular keyword after 1,000 results
when assessing the aggregate relevance score to determine which
results are spawned. By truly understanding this, you can
discover a great deal from using a few basic Google search
operators (http://www.google.com/help/operators) to determine
what type of foothold a competitor has for a given keyword or
niche.

Basic Competitive Analysis Metrics

1. Start with the keyword you are interested in researching.
Place the keyword "in quotes" in a Google search box.

For example "SEO" (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22seo%22)
returns 262,000,000 competing pages with the chronological
order of the strongest sites first.

Then look to the right and determine the number of competing
pages you are up against "for that keyword". It will say results
1 of 10 of (the number of competing pages).

This allows you to assess the competitive landscape with one
brief metric. The extent of what you consider a competitive
keyword depends on the website. For example, most websites can
acquire a keyword under 50,000 competing pages with ease and
competitive keywords start above 100,000 results and ascend into
the millions (pages in index / divided by the top 1,000
results).

The next few metrics will allow you to understand where your SEO
ceiling is (what threshold your website has for keyword
benchmarks). Our blog for example can devour a keyword with up
to 1,000,000 competing pages just from one post of mentioning
those keywords (without backlinks).

So, all the talk about building website authority does have a
place when you understand the implications to rank with less
effort. Authority sites have the ability to zero in on a keyword
and skip over hundreds of other websites and reach the top 10
results by the merit of trust and internal link weight and
dynamism they possess. In keeping with the topic at hand, let's
move to the next metric.

2. Evaluate your competitors domain and determine the amount of
pages they have by using this search command in Google. You can
use the #1 site and the #10 site to gauge an average of pages
required to capture the keyword or, if you want you can use the
#1st, 2nd and 3rd site that rank for the selected keyword to see
which formulas they are entrenched in.

site:competitorsite.com (this shows you how many pages they have
indexed in Google)

3. Next, determine how saturated their website is with the
keyword in question.

site:competitorsite.com keyword

This shows you how many pages are indexed that include the
keyword within their website. If the site in the top 10 is an
authority domain, it can rank from one keyword alone in the
title tag, description tag or having the keyword in the body
text (or any combination of these three metrics).

While most websites do not have that luxury, often dozens or
hundreds of pages are required to cross the tipping point of
co-occurrence for that keyword within the website and acquire a
top ranking. However each keyword has a threshold which is going
to vary depending on the unique metrics of each website (which
is why you need to look at more than one site for evaluation).

4. Now that you know that your competitor's site contains Y
amount of pages and X amount of those pages are dedicated to a
specific keyword, you can go the the most relevant listing
returned from their site and look at the off page factors
(which means finding out how many backlinks are linking to that
page). To do so, use Yahoo Site Explorer
(http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) and type the specific
URL in and look at the inlinks tab to see how many pages are
linking to that page.

For example, if the homepage is returned as the top ranking
result for the keyword using the competitorsite.com keyword
search command, ignore it and look for an actual page that has a
title, or relevant shingle with the keyword (in the title, URL
or description).

If they targeted a keyword using a broad match method (which
means it was not necessarily the objective, but their site
acquired the ranking based on ambient factors, then you will
only see a sparse mention of the keyword). The point being, the
homepage is a catch all and will not provide you with the same
amount of depth when attempting to data mine deep links from
your competitors.

The idea is, you want to know (a) how many pages they have
indexed (b) how many pages contain the keyword (c) how many deep
links (http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/seo/
develop-domain-authority/) (how many links just to that page)
the top ranking page has (from outside the site) as well as
(d) how well the site in internally linked (for that keyword).

We can determine criteria a-c with simple search commands, and
you can also determine if the site is treated as an authority
based on the keywords that appear in bold when using the site:
command, websites start transforming into authority sites
through topical relevance after 200-300 pages are developed
around a topic (if they are linked and optimized properly).

5. Crunch the numbers and assess the competitive landscape of
the keyword in question.

For example, if you know that the top 3 sites all have an
average of 1000 pages and out of those 1000 pages 50% or more of
them contain the keyword in question and your site has 20 pages,
then you are not being realistic with your ranking objectives.

I am not suggesting to go add 1000 pages overnight (as that
would not be natural) but rather, start chipping away at the
keyword using a variety of SEO tactics
(http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/seo-resources/
search-engine-optimization-2/).

6. Check the allintitle, allintext and allinanchor thresholds
for the selected competitors' sites. This means finding where
they rank in Google (in the top 1,000 results before the results
get obscured / redundant) using the following search operators.

allintitle:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in
title)

allintext:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in
their body text)

allinanchor:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of anchor
text / links with this keyword)

Using Google again, you can look at the competitor's on page and
off page metrics, instead of breaking them out individually, you
can just use NicheWatch (http://www.nichewatch.com/) instead, or
our Ultimate SEO Toolkit (http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/
ultimate-seo-toolkit/), to perform this function.

The Conclusion

SEO is only limited by your imagination when it comes to
determining the extent of how you use tactics for discovery and
analysis. We covered a few simple metrics using Google search
operators above that allow you to isolate co-occurrence and
determine the global keyword density for a site.

This does provide a preliminary analysis to at least let you
know what your up against (qualifying a competitor or your own
domain to a keyword). If you reverse engineer the averages, you
can find the tipping point for essentially any keyword and craft
a plan of action to acquire it.

For example 1,000 pages indexed, 900 have the keyword in exact
match and the main landing page has 50 inbound links from Page
Rank 4 pages. Now you have a threshold to exceed. Although this
is a preliminary method, sometimes looking at basic metrics such
as these can provide an immense amount of insight and determine
the next competitive threshold you target for analysis.
================================================================
Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization
strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions
Seo Company (http://www.seodesignsolutions.com). He has actively
been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a
wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies
to individuals involved in online business.
================================================================

Copyright © 2009 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SEO-News is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.