Shooting for number 1 in a competitive market.

[crickeys]

Hi all,

I'm new to these forums, so please be gentle :rolleyes:

I've recently developed a website geared to new & expectant parents. This is a quite a large market and as such has a substantial amount of competition in the search engines. One of the main functions my site has is a database of over 18,000 baby names.

Doing a quick search on google for baby names, you'll find many different sites. However, I feel only a handful are worthy of being on the front page.

Being quite biased, I believe my baby name search to be one of those few. I'm quite curious to know your thoughts.

My main question, however, is how to rise to the top of a crowded market, when you feel your product is quite good. I've noticed people on my site browsing quite consistently and have been given good feedback on the layout and functionality of the site. I've seen hideous sites with baby names that are much higher in the rankings than I. In fact, I don't even know WHERE I AM for the term.

Is it the fact that these sites have more links than I? I've looked under the hood of some of these top SERP sites and don't seem to find any spectacular SEO. Is it merely how long these sites have been around? There Page Rank? There links?

Any and all help would be appreciated. My site is birthvillage.com

Thanks!
Brian Gruber

[ConnieS]

My main question, however, is how to rise to the top of a crowded market, when you feel your product is quite good.

The above is something every webmaster thinks about their site.


JMO which will not cost you anything. Personally I do not think links have much to do with how any individual page ranks. I'm sure there will be others who disagree. IMHO content on a page is far more valuable than incoming links.

[grasshopper]

brian, your problem is twofold:

1) a site created in november of 2005, which raises the possibility that you're sandboxed and won't see much traffic from google for months.

2) a linkdomain: search at yahoo shows only 38 inbound links for your site. this is the primary issue that you'll have to address to see improvments in your rankings in any engine.

i would recommend spending some time doing a bit of reading to ensure that your efforts in promoting your site are spent in the most beneficial manner possible. you might start out with rand's beginner's guide to seo (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php), which will give you a great start. there's plenty more you can read from there - if you need a quick syllabus, feel free to PM me.

[Marcia]

Welcome to SEW Forums, Brian. Glad to have you here!

Actually, for the phrase baby names you're looking at competing with over 99 million pages at Google (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-11,GGLD:en&q=baby+names)

For this you absolutely WILL need to have a lot of inbound links, and while the tool is no doubt excellent, it would still be a wise idea to create additional content pages and optimize for many of the other keywords that are pertinent and relevant - and get links direct to some of the more important interior pages, as well as optimizing the internal navigation. Look how many keyword phrases there are to choose from:

Overture keyword selector tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)

I'm fairly familiar with this particular market niche, and with this kind of site you should have a fairly easy time getting some good inbound links.

[crickeys]

Thanks for all the wonderful advice. Do you think that putting together a link directory would be a wise idea, or just a waste of space?

I was thinking of adding a directory to store links, then ask prospective link partners to trade with me. However, I know that the page rank of this directory will probably be pretty low, as will the links I exchange with.

Is it worth it to have many inbound links, if they all have a low page rank?

- Brian

[ProPokerMedia]

this post is only relevant in regards to the sheer # you seem to be in competition against, one of my clients, pokerroyalty.com hovers around page 1 and 2 on G for the search: player management

depending on the day or possibly datacenter serving results, the # my client is in competition with for that particular search ranges from 60million to over 160million results.

at the time of this post, my client holds position 4 and 5 on the first page out of 174million results as seen on the following link that goes to a screen shot i just took:

http://www.propokermedia.com/pokerroyalty--google-result--player-management.gif

i would steer clear of the link directory idea on your site, you'd be better off having a blog on the site where you talk about other sites - then - link to them. also, try for that scenario with the sites that link to yours. also, lots of links help, but a couple handfuls of links from uber-relevant sites will do more justice imho.

thanks,
chris

[Marcia]

Chris, it's a completely different type of market sector with totally different demographic and type of target audience.The "parenting" sector is very community oriented and to some degree viral in nature, and the promotional opportunities and avenues are quite different.

Regardless, the site will need more crawlable content pages and needs to go after the "long tail" keyphrases rather than the primary search phrase for the time being. Sure, Google is taking a while and so is Yahoo in recent days - but MSN is wide open for new sites and can be very, very lucrative when targeting certain demographics of users.

lots of links help, but a couple handfuls of links from uber-relevant sites will do more justice imho.Really good point Chris, and that's one reason this is a decent market to pursue spontaneous one way links when word gets around. There's a lot of opportunity amongst the parenting community.

I haven't checked backlinks, but one that's really uber-relevant is an ODP listing, and those aren't that easy to get. Having unique, original content is a big help toward that end, among the other reasons.

[ProPokerMedia]

actually... i was just thinking, you should use a combination of separate (but integrated) directory / forum / review system. that would be nice.