Noble Samurai

Right now, Google is updating the data it reports for PageRank.

TIP: If you’re new to SEO, here’s why PageRank is important…

PageRank is a measurement that Google uses to rate the quality and quantity of links pointing to a web page.

The higher the PageRank score (out of 10), the better the links, the more likely you are to rank well in Google.

Although Google measures and recalculates PageRank constantly, it only shows up-to-date PageRank data to the public roughly once every 3 months.

The last update was around April 3rd 2010. The next one will probably be in September 2010.

So this is a rare opporunity to get an up-to-date snapshot of the PageRank scores of all the pages of your sites.

If you’ve been using Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker, make sure you monitor your Rank Tracker data over the next few days to see how your PageRank changes. (Does your PageRank rise? Does it fall? Does it stay the same?)

By updating your ranking data regularly inside Market Samurai, you’ll be able to keep a historical record of PageRank for all of your sites’ pages – as well as Backlink data, Indexed Page counts and [of course!] your search engine rankings.

Market Samurai will turn all of this data into pretty graphs that make it easy to see changes in PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages and Rankings over time – like this one (showing rankings):

(To view these graphs, or historical data, just click the graph icon beside any result inside Rank Tracker)

Obviously, if you’re going to monitor your site’s performance over time like this, you’ll need to have access to Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker module – one of the advanced tools only available to paid users of Market Samurai.

So if you’re using a trial version of Market Samurai, or have an expired trial, you will need to upgrade to the full version to use this tool.

Recommended Rank Tracker Resources:

If you’re new to using Rank Tracker, or if you would like to use it more effectively, here are several free resources that we’ve recently released to help you:

• Using Rank Tracker to Fine Tune Your SEO Strategy – Dr Anthony and Alex offer tutorials on how to use Rank Tracker effectively.
• Market Samurai Dojo Tutorials: Rank Tracker – Here you can find training (written and video) on all Market Samurai tools. (Rank Tracker training is at the bottom of the page.)
• Insider Tips: How to Get The Most Out Of Rank Tracker – Miriam addresses 4 key questions people have around Rank Tracker.

To get the most out of Rank Tracker, make sure you check these out.

And again, if you don’t have a full version copy of Market Samurai yet, make sure you get it so that you can access the Rank Tracker Module.

Brent

P.S. – Has your PageRank risen in the latest update? What link building activities have you done in the past 3 months to cause the rise?

Share your tips with others in the Samurai community below.

Here’s some very smart SEO / link-building software that we didn’t create – but I wish we did…

The 30-Second Summary for Busy People…

Michelle MacPhearson released some very smart new SEO software this week.

It “reverse engineers” Google’s results pages while you watch…

Then it gives you a blueprint showing the top high authority, keyword relevant sites to target for backlinks that will improve your rankings.

And you can get it free here. (Yes, it works on both PC and Mac.)

Note: Expect to leave your name and email address in exchange for your copy, but that’s it… The software is free – no upsells to an “advanced version” or one-time offers on signup – once you’ve entered your email address, the software’s free.

What Makes The “Rank Decoding Engine” So Cool?

When I first used it, I was impressed with the “Rank Decoding Engine” because it’s so simple – but so clever.

What the software does is simply show you the sites that consistently rank well in Google – in your specific niche, or in general.

These are the sites that Google recognizes as the most trusted, high authority, most relevant websites…

• Trusted sites;
• High authority sites;
• Relevant to your niche.

Finding sites that tick all three boxes is like finding the holy grail of link building. These are the places to get the best backlinks (links back to your site) if you want top rankings.

So simple, and so clever.

That’s what impressed me about Michelle’s software.

(And I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think of it first! “Authority Link Finder Samurai” has a nice ring to it, don’t you agree?…)

So why do high authority, relevant backlinks matter?

Because Google says so.

Google wants to see links pointing to your site from other high authority sites in your market before it gives you top rankings.

Take it from them:

“Thematic incoming links from authority sites carry more weight than on-page optimization”

- Matt Cutts (Google Engineer and unofficial Google SEO Spokesman)

“Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote from Page A to Page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help make other pages important”

- Google on Creating a “Google-Friendly Site”

So targeting the most trusted, high authority sites in your market for link building can give you the biggest bang for your link building buck.

That’s why Michelle’s Rank Decoding Engine software is so valuable.

How to Download the Rank Decoding Engine:

To get Michelle MacPhearson’s new Rank Decoding Engine, you’ll need to sign up here:

Get the Rank Decoding Engine
(For Mac and PC.)

You’ll be asked for your name and email address, but that’s it… The software is free – there are no upsells to an “advanced version” – it’s just free.

(After you’ve received your download link, make sure you watch the video on the download page. It explains in detail how the software works, and gives you an action plan for how to use it on your site.)

Once you’ve downloaded it, read on…

3 Samurai Tips for Using the Rank Decoding Engine…

When you begin using the software, there are 3 Samurai tips I recommend you use to get the most value out of the Rank Decoding Engine.

1. Watch What Happens…

If you already own the full version of Market Samurai, don’t forget to use it to track your rankings!

You should be doing this before and after any SEO activity.

(After all – you can’t optimize something if you’re not measuring it!)

Before you begin, put your main keywords and URLs into Market Samurai’s Rank Tracker so that you can watch your rankings as they rise.

Not only is it encouraging when you see your site’s rankings rise, it also reinforces that what you’re doing is actually working.

2. Get the Right Keywords

The Rank Decoding Engine will check up to 10 of your keywords to show you which sites consistently rank well in your niche.

Rather than picking keywords randomly, get Market Samurai to show you the keywords that Google thinks are most relevant to your main niche keyword.

Because you’ll be asking Google for both the most relevant keywords in your niche (through Market Samurai), and the most relevant sites to those keywords (through the Rank Decoding Engine), you can be sure that the sites you’re targeting for backlinks are the most relevant high authority sites in your niche.

To find the keywords that are most relevant to your main keyword, enter your main keyword into Market Samurai’s Keyword Research module and select 10 of the most closely related keywords that Market Samurai generates for you.

Tick the boxes to the left of the keywords, then select “Actions on selected” then “Copy tags (comma separated)” and paste the keywords into the Rank Decoding Engine.

3. Build Feeder Pages

Rather than just focussing on the quickest easiest links (e.g. blog commenting), spend some time building “feeder pages”…

No doubt you’ll find a bunch of web 2.0 and user generated content sites in the mix where you can upload your own content (and put backlinks to your site inside the content.)

It might take a little longer to write and upload an article, but it has a double benefit for SEO.

Not only is this valuable for backlinks, it also gives you “feeder pages” – content on other high authority sites that have a good chance of ranking well themselves, and driving even more traffic to your site.

…But of course, you’ll need Michelle MacPhearson’s Rank Decoding Engine first to do all this (here).

In the last post, I discussed one of Google’s last remaining SEO biases – its bias towards keyword optimized domain names.

Today, I want to look at something on the opposite end of the SEO domain spectrum – something almost impossible to influence…

…And then I want to show you some search engine jiu-jitsu that allows you to overcome this seemingly impossible SEO factor.

You see, there are a LOT of techniques that we use to try to come out on top in SEO – keyword placement in title tags and URLs, keyword-rich content throughout the site; submitting our pages to DMOZ and Yahoo! – all things that we can do almost instantly to make our pages more tempting to search engines.

But there’s one aspect of SEO that even the best Internet Marketer has trouble defying…

Time…

Some aspects of SEO just can’t be blitzed in the same way that others can – which is why search engines put a lot of “trust” in some factors above others when it comes to ranking pages.

For example – if you want to target your webpage to a specific keyword, within a minute you can immediately edit the page to add the keyword to the content. It’s not a hard thing to do, and it’s something you can influence almost instantly. So while having your keyword in your webpage’s content is beneficial, Google places little trust in this by itself.

A more trusted SEO factor is backlinks. Backlinks can be influenced, but it takes a lot more time and effort to build quality backlinks than it does to simply add a keyword to a page. Because this process is slow – because it’s harder to influence or manipulate or game – because it takes a lot of TIME and EFFORT to affect – Google can put a lot of trust into backlinks when it comes to deciding which pages should get top rankings.

But there is one “trust” factor that simply cannot be influenced using money or effort…

Domain Age.

If you purchase a domain today and your competitor has already existed for two years, then when you hit that two year mark they’ll still be two years older. There is just nothing you can do to make your domain age at a faster rate than another domain.

Remember the “outrunning lions” story from our recent blog post?

The one that discussed why we should look for ways to be as-good or better-than our competitors in as many ways as possible if we want to outrank them?

Domain Age is one area in which a new site can’t expect to beat a competitor.

If you’re competing against aged competitors, their domain age creates a huge area of uncertainty. We might be able to draw close, or beat them in other areas – but they will always be ahead in domain age.

So we can’t be sure how much extra effort we’ll need to put into beating them in other areas (areas that we CAN influence) in order to outrank them – or even whether that effort will be successful.

If all of this sounds a bit hopeless – like some aspects of SEO just cannot be influenced, no matter how much effort you invest into them, and your older rivals will always have at least this one advantage over you – don’t give up just yet.

Here’s a tactic you can use to sidestep time.

It’s clear that we can’t make a domain older than it is – so instead, if we want to influence Domain Age, we have to work the other way. We need to find domains that already have age, and yet suit our needs.

The answer is to simply BUY an Aged Domain.

Aged Domains are domains that have been purchased in the past and have either fallen into disuse or were parked and never saw the light of day.

They can be great sources of pre-cultivated traffic, backlinks, sometimes even content.

But most importantly, they have that key feature that we’re looking for – established domain age.

Rather than trying to build domain age over time ourselves, we simply let someone else do the hard work for us – and then come in to reap the rewards.

The theory is very simple…

But getting your hands on a pre-owned domain can be a little trickier.

Typically aged domains only become available if they expire, or if their current owner decides they want to sell.

Some domain registrars, and sites such as Flippa.com, have created online marketplaces for aged domains.

The unique feature of Flippa is that it allows you to purchase entire web-sites, including all content – not just the domain name, like many registrars and auction sites do.

(There are a lot of “how-to’s” and tricks here that I want to come back to and show you in more detail in a later blog post. But for now, make sure you take some time to have a play with Flippa. It’s something that is going to be huge for internet marketers in the next 12 months.)

What if you can’t find the “right” domain for sale?

Well, there’s always the proactive approach.

If a registrant’s contact details appear in WHOIS records you can also approach them directly via email or phone and make them an offer.

Obviously if a site is well established then the owner may be less likely to sell – but if the domain is inactive then the owner may well part with it if you make it worth their while.

Watch the market regularly

Finally – if you’re buying domains in your market for age or other authority factors, don’t just check the auction or sales sites once.

Make sure you keep a regular eye on them so that you see the relevant, high-value domains that pop up in your market – before they get bought by someone else.

It’s effort-intensive, and time-intensive to search through all of the auction sites, sales sites, and domain registrars on a regular basis – but it’s one of the few effective ways to get your hands on high quality domains as they become available.

Plus, the potential SEO and traffic boosts involved in getting your hands on just a single high-quality, matured, keyword optimised domain can often repay your time investment many times over through the traffic that it brings.

Brent

P.S. – So far, our previous two blog posts have received over 375 comments [wow!].

Among the comments were a lot of questions about choosing the right keyword optimized domain: keyword selection; adding prefixes and suffixes; hyphens or no hyphens; .org, .net, .com, .info, etc – which is best; etc.

I want to get as many of these key questions answered for you as possible in the next few posts, plus go through a lot of the “how-to’s” – so I’ve asked a friend and SEO domain name expert to help share his knowledge and experience in these areas. It’s shaping up to be some killer content, but give us a day or two to finish it for you – there’s a lot for us to get through here.

Most aspects of SEO work on “equal” ground.

No matter how exclusive and high quality a backlink is, your competitor can always get a backlink of equal value.

No matter how relevant an article is, your competitor can always write an article of similar keyword relevance.

Almost every aspect of SEO can be duplicated by your opposition.

So when you find an aspect of SEO that is entirely unbalanced – and effective enough that it can tip the scales against the sites of multi-million dollar companies – it’s worth knowing how to use this aspect to your advantage.

A picture’s worth a thousand words.

Open up Market Samurai and look at the SEO Competition matrix for “Credit Cards”.

You’ll see 10 results that look a lot like this:

Notice anything strange?

It might be something that you’ve seen in your own niche. You might even notice it practically every time you do a Google search.

These 10 results reveal important story about one of Google’s great biases.

Let’s start looking at the 2nd result, and continue through the results immediately below it.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express – all huge names, synonymous with the term “credit cards”.

In terms of search engine relevance – these sites (synonymous with the term “credit cards” itself) are some of the most relevant credit card sites online.

Below those, there are some credit card comparison services, and smaller credit card providers such as Discover Card, Citi and Chase – the sort of “mix” of sites that you’d typically expect to find on a search engine results page… All relevant sites, but with lower levels of authority and relevance.

But the first result…

Here’s where things get interesting…

The first result on the page is www.creditcards.com

It sits ahead of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express – all multi-billion dollar companies with marketing budgets that could buy a small country…

Their names are synonymous with the words “credit cards”…

They have plenty of high PageRank links, including links from some of the largest and most reputable sites online…

And 100,000’s more links than their smaller rival…

…And yet they’ve been beaten to the punch – they’ve met a real David versus Goliath scenario with this “creditcards.com”.

This story repeats itself…

It’s something you can see in practically any keyword niche you analyze.

Smaller sites with keyword-optimized domains are seeing their SEO efforts magnified over time – giving them an unfair advantage that allows them to outrank competitors who boast more links, better content, higher PageRanks and more.

Let’s look deeper into the SEO analysis to see it in action…

Here are the off-page results again from Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module.

www.creditcards.com has lowest PageRank (PR) of all domains on the first page of results, and fewer Backlinks to the Page (BLP) and Backlinks to the Domain (BLD) than most of its competitors.

Its domain age is roughly on par with most of the domains there (some are higher, some are lower).

But it has one clear feature almost exclusively absent from the competition – it has the keyword “credit cards” in the domain name.

This demonstrates just how valuable it can be to get a good keyword-optimized domain.

Good domain names make SEO a whole lot easier.

They leverage or magnify your SEO efforts – so that each link you build, or article you create, counts more heavily towards your rankings – so you can put in less work than your competitors and still get the same (or better) effect.

This gives you a strong advantage over your opponents.

Think about the value of getting better results, with less time and effort.

Could it mean you have more time on your hands to devote to improving your site in other ways? Could it mean you get more visitors? Could it mean more sales? Could it mean bigger profits?

These opportunities to leverage your results in SEO are rare.

Using keyword optimized domains is one of the few “jiu-jitsu” SEO techniques that still remain effective, allowing you to use the search engines’ heavy bias towards keyword optimized domains to your advantage.

So what should you do now?

4 Action Points for Using Domains Effectively

1. Use Keyword Domains for SEO – Obviously if you’re setting up a new site, and you aim to invest in SEO to attract visitors, get a keyword optimized domain.
2. Consider Moving to a Keyword Domain – If you’ve just set up a site, and it’s still in its early phase, consider moving to a keyword optimized domain. If you have an older site, the decision might not be so clear-cut though, because moving to a new domain name usually means starting afresh in the eyes of the search engines.
3. Keep Your Competitiors Out – Check for, and get, any high-value keyword domains in your market. Remember: no matter how successful you come to be you can always be unseated by a competitor bearing a keyword.com domain – so even if you don’t use the domains immediately yourself, protect yourself and keep potential competitors out of your niche by holding onto dangerous domains yourself.
4. Just Wait For What’s Up Next… – Over the next week, we’re going to drill deeper and deeper into how to find, select and utilize domains effectively for SEO, and look at some of the advanced techniques that professional domainers use to secure dynamite domains, and outrank established high-PageRank competitors like they were taking candy from babies.

Remember to watch the blog, and your email, for the next instalment on using domains for SEO.

Again, over the next week we’ve going be covering some little-known advanced strategies for domain names, with nuts-and-bolts how-to examples – and it’s something you won’t want to miss.

Two guys are in the jungle when they see a lion running towards them. Frantically, one of the men starts putting on his running shoes.

Surprised, the other man says “What are you thinking, you can’t outrun a lion!!!”

“I don’t have to outrun the lion,” said the man, “I just have to outrun you.”

This story is very relevant to SEO strategy.

It’s not always necessary to be the best or the fastest or the strongest in the jungle – you don’t have to be able to outrun the lion – you just need to be a little better than your competition.

This idea is one of the most important things to keep in mind when you’re looking at the SEO Competition Matrix inside Market Samurai – or considering an SEO strategy.

There is no such thing as the “perfectly optimised” website or the “perfect SEO strategy” – there is always something more you can do; more backlinks to get, more content to post.

So the goal is to just do what it takes to be better than your competitors. In fact, doing this can mean you achieve better results without ever wasting excess effort.

Consider this…

When you perform a Google query you get a page of 10 results. The second result on this page can be expected to get 21% of traffic, which sounds pretty high

BUT! The first result can be expected to get 42% of traffic…

This is a huge difference – the first search result gets double the organic traffic of the second.

So what’s the difference between the two sites? Has the first ranking result done twice the work of the second ranking site?

No way!

In truth, the site that is in second place might be equal in almost every single way to the site in first place:

• the same PageRank
• the same domain age
• the same on page optimisation factors such as keywords in title and meta tags

The difference could be something as small as one backlink on the #1 site being better quality than one on the #2 site.

Just one link!

This is why it’s so important to remember the theme of competition…

…One link could mean the difference between 42% of traffic and 21% of traffic…

…Which means twice (or half) as many visitors, opt-ins and sales for your site.

With 21% of traffic potentially hinging on something as small as one backlink you can make your approach to the SEO of your site more focused.

You need to find out how fast your competition is running – remember that you don’t need to outrun the lion, just your competitior.

When conducting your SEO, examine your competition closely. Look at the specifics of their site and ask yourself two questions:

1. How much time, money or effort will it take for me to equal the success of my opponent?
   And the second, more important question…
2. How can I exceed their results?

We’ve seen that small differences can lead to dramatically different levels of expected traffic, and therefore the potential earning power of your site.

But the hard truth is, it’s not always as simple as building one better link. If you can build links, so can your competitors. Anything you can do, they can do too - and if each of you starts committing resources to being better than your opposition (and you get drawn into a “link-war”), you can both lose out.

So, wherever you can, you need to look for ways that you can uniquely unbalance the playing field – to give yourself an advantage that your rivals cannot compete with in the long run.

It could be your ability to produce higher quality content, your ability to utilize your relationships in your market, or your ability to magnify your SEO efforts using a leveraged search engine optimization strategy.

In our next post, I’m going to touch on one such leveraged search engine optimization strategy, and how some sites use this technique to get higher rankings (with fewer, lower quality links) than their multi-billion-dollar competitors.

Until then remember – to get ahead in the search engines, you don’t need a “perfect” SEO strategy – you just need an advantage (no matter how large or small) over your competitors.

Hello Samurai,

In the recent batch of updates, we made some changes to the data that some of our international users receive.

These changes have improved the quality and accuracy of non-English and non-US results in the SEO Competition and Rank Tracker modules.

What’s Changed?

Previously, Market Samurai wasn’t able to “read” or “understand” Google results pages in languages other than English.

This meant Market Samurai had difficulty working out where sites rank for a keyword (the main function of the SEO Competition and Rank Tracker modules) when it had to read results in Arabic or Tagalog (for example).

So to get around this problem, Market Samurai would search English-language versions of Google for non-English keywords.

Unfortunately, this meant Market Samurai would often report slightly different results.

So… We taught Market Samurai how to “read” 41 languages.

With this improved language and region support, Market Samurai is able to give you full SEO Analysis and Rank Tracking for all languages and regions – (9,594 different language and region variations in total – 234 countries x 41 languages… and that’s BEFORE you look at Market Samurai’s multi-Search-Engine and multi-Match-Type options for Rank Tracking).

And this means smart Samurai who are doing SEO in multiple languages, or attacking foreign and non-English-language niches (where the competition is low, and the pay-offs high) can get even more accurate keyword data.

Brent

P.S. – If you don’t have access to Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module or Rank Tracker, you can get a 12-Day Market Samurai Trial here, or Upgrade To The Full Version and get lifetime access at the discounted price of $149.

Hello Fellow Samurai,

Today, I want to share with you 2 NEW Features that we’ve just added to Market Samurai’s SEO Competition analysis module.

With these new tools, you can conduct even more in-depth, and more powerful SEO analysis.

NEW FEATURE: Internal Backlink Counts

Backlinks remain one of the most important factors for increasing the rankings of a webpage in search engine results pages. They are like “votes” from other webpages – the more “votes” (or links) a web-page receives, the more authority it has, and the higher it will rise in the search engines.

Previously, Market Samurai’s SEO Matrix (in the SEO Competition module) would look at backlinks from external, 3rd party web-sites.

Now, Market Samurai gives you the ability to analyze backlinks to a web-page, from other web-pages within the same web-site.

This is valuable because, when it comes to SEO Analysis, there are three BIG reasons to pay attention to internal links:

How to Analyze Internal Backlinks

Just like with external backlinks if you’re conducting SEO Competition analysis inside Market Samurai, you want to compete against web-pages that have as FEW internal backlinks as possible.

This is because pages with few internal backlinks will be the easiest to beat.

NEW FEATURE: Index Count

This second feature is also part of the SEO Competition module.

It’s a new column called “Index Count” that shows the number of pages from that web-site that are known to Google.

This is an important factor in measuring the performance of a site.

The number of pages indexed indicates how much attention Google pays to a web-site. Usually – the higher the figure is, the more attention Google is paying to the web-site, and the more valuable Google perceives the web-site to be.

(In fact, if you run a large web-site, and you notice that your “Index Count” is dropping – then usually your search rankings will be dropping too.)

How To Access These New Features

If you already own the full-version of Market Samurai, these new features are available for you to keep. (Yes, this update is completely free)

If not, then you can get access to these tools by upgrading your copy of Market Samurai here. The cost is $149 (currently, with no ongoing fees) and gives you updates to a lot of neat updates – like the ones we’ve released today!

Once you have access to the SEO Competition module in your full-version copy of Market Samurai – open the SEO Competition module, and ensure the “BLP” (Page Backlinks) and “IC” (Index Count) columns are selected. Then press Generate Results.

By default, Market Samurai shows the external links for a website; you can use the drop down just above the table (marked in the screenshot below) to select one of two other options: “Internal”, the number of internal links to a website, and “Total”, the total numbers of links, including internal and external links.

The index count is shown as its own column, IC:

You will notice that, for both features, we have made the results clickable – so that you can click on any “Index Count” or “Page Backlinks” numbers to visit the raw data source for yourself.

Mike

Hi Team,

I’ve got something exciting to share with you about Market Samurai.

We just released an improvement to the SEO Competition module that makes backlink anchor text analysis of web-pages that have a lot of back links much faster, and easier to complete.

This latest update has resulted in a MASSIVE speed increase for completing backlink anchor text analysis.

In one test, we found a 9,400% speed increase. That’s a speed up of nearly a factor of 100.  In fact, the improvement is even better than that: previously, the more backlinks you analysed, the slower the process went – twice as many backlinks could take nearly four times as long to analyse. Now few pages will take longer than 10 minutes to analyse.

The low-down on backlink analysis

The backlink analysis functionality in Market Samurai allows you to check two items:

• the PageRank of the pages linking to a URL; and
• the text contained within those links – for example, the link in the previous item to Wikipedia has the text “PageRank”.

The text is important – this is the most powerful factor Google takes into account when ranking your website for a keyword. So knowing the kinds of keywords being used in links to a page is essential to understand how Google will rank that page.

How do I do backlink analysis with Market Samurai?

First open up a project in Market Samurai and enter the SEO Competition module. Then generate the top results for your keyword or enter your own custom URL.

Now just click on the down-array to the right of the link.

Next, press the Anchor Text Analysis button to see a detailed link-text analysis for that webpage. Alternatively, you could also analyse the PageRanks of the backlinks.

A new window will pop-up showing you the information you asked for.

How much time will this save me?

Well, if you were trying to analyse a webpage with, say:

• 300 backlinks, which in some cases might have taken over 10 minutes, might now take around 1 minute;
• 600 backlinks, which might have taken over 40 minutes, should take around 2 minutes;
• 1000 backlinks, previously taking more than 90 minutes, should take 3 or 4 minutes.

Of course, the exact numbers depend on the page, your internet connection, the speed of your computer, and many other factors.

So, good luck investigating your niches – and please leave a comment if you enjoy this new update or if you have some thoughts on backlink analysis you’d like to share!

Mike

P.S. – If you don’t own Market Samurai yet, or your Market Samurai trial has expired, you will have lost access to the SEO Competition analysis tools. This means you will not see the benefit of this improvement until you upgrade your copy of Market Samurai to the full version.

If you already own Market Samurai, you can open the software right now and begin benefiting from this improvement.

Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of emails from people wanting tips on how to analyze the SEO Competition matrix – so I wanted to share with you this Market Samurai technique – from outside the Samurai dojo.

Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton are the guys behind Commission Blueprint – two people that many of you will know already.

Although we’ve never mentioned them before, literally thousands of Market Samurai users have been using the Commission Blueprint affiliate marketing strategy since it launched around a year ago – including some of our own staff.

(And, while I’m ashamed to say it, for a while they produced better training on how to use Market Samurai than we were producing ourselves.)

Rather than looking broadly at the SEO Competition matrix, they focus on 3 key areas that give them a good overview of the strength of their competitors.

Here’s their step-by-step strategy (using the example above):

1. The first thing to look for is whether more than one competitor has a ‘Y’ (a Yes) in ALL the YAH, Title, URL, Desc & Head columns. If there is more than one site, we should pass on this keyword and move into the next one.
2. If no (and for this keyword it’s a ‘no’), we then need to look at the Pagerank of the each of the websites (PR column) and make sure that there are at least two sites with a Pagerank of 3 or below in the top 10. In this case, there are. In fact, 8 of them fall into this category.
3. We then need to look at the number of backlinks that each of these pages have pointing to them (BLP) and check that there are two sites with less than 50.

It’s a nice, simple, repeatable strategy.

I took the extract above from Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton’s “Generating Affiliate Profits From Free Google Traffic” ebook, which I read this weekend.

It’s their a step by step technique for promoting affiliate products with SEO, taking actual examples from their business (which turns over around $7million per year).

This ebook is available free right now – however, the reason it’s free is because Tim and Steve are giving it away as part of their Commission Blueprint 2.0 launch (so you’ll be asked for your email address in exchange for the book).

If you want to get the “Generating Affiliate Profits From Free Google Traffic” ebook and you’re feeling generous you can use our private referrer link (and help fund the development of more Market Samurai goodies if you choose to buy later on from their launch).

Or you can use this direct link you can use if you prefer – and we won’t see a cent.

But either way, get a copy of the ebook.

The ebook is genuinely high quality content – the strategies for SEO Competition matrix analysis and choosing a domain name are methodical and easy to follow, the information is detailed enough for you to put everything into practice immediately (with no “missing pieces”), and I particularly like their quick and cheap test to validate traffic levels before they begin – so it’s well worth getting a copy.

Brent

P.S. – If you don’t have access to the SEO Competition module, you can upgrade to the full version of Market Samurai here.

Hi Team

This is something I’ve never told you about.

Some people have already worked this out for themselves…

And it’s the reason Market Samurai works the way it does today.

In Fact, Market Samurai was Built Around This…

Before Market Samurai was released to the public, we were using the same tools ourselves to do semantic site structure analysis for sites that we were building.

The reason was simple – with the right site structuring, linking and keyword use (all using semantically relevant keywords) we could achieve rankings with fewer links, less PageRank and less site-age.

And that meant a better return on investment from any SEO work we did.

“Better Results? Less Effort? How do I get this!?” I hear you say.

Well, let me show you what we were doing – and how you can do it yourself.

How to “Sharpen” Your Site – Samurai Style!

First, thing’s first…

You need to find a core site keyword – something that has high levels of traffic, high levels of value, and relatively low levels of competition.

Everything will revolve around this one core keyword.

Finding a Core Keyword

You’re looking for high-traffic, low-competition, high-value keywords here.

I like to set my Market Samurai filters to these levels: Above 80 hits per day in SEOT, below 100,000 competing pages in SEOC (although below 30,000 is best), above 15% phrase usage in PBR and over $1 in SEOV.

However, I personally like to see something that is better than the bare minimum levels.

SEO Analysis on your Main Site Keyword

Next, you’ll also want to do SEO Competition analysis to make sure you’re competing in a market where young, low PageRank, poorly optimized sites with few links are already ranking.

What I like about this example is the low PageRanks of pages appearing in the top 10, the lack of on-page optimization on most sites, and the low levels of Page Backlinks to the pages.

The ages of some of the domains, the fact that most sites have DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory backlinks, and the high number of domain backlinks make me think twice about this keyword.

I might still try it out – but with these factors working against me, my chances of getting that illusive top spot easily might be more difficult – and that means it may take a lot more work to get there.

Refocus your Keyword Research

Once you have this core site keyword, create a New Project in Market Samurai for your main site keyword this keyword – because we’re going to refocus our analysis onto this one keyword.

Start by generating keywords around this keyword using the Google Synonym Tool option with “Include Additional” selected.

Find Category Keywords

By tapping into Google’s Synonym Tool to generate keywords, Market Samurai is able to show you up to 200 related “branches” around your core keyword.

You’ll want to (again) filter out high competition, low traffic, low value keywords. The keywords we’re left with will be good for our web-site categories.

In this example, I performed almost identical analysis to before, when I was finding a core site keyword – however, I dropped my minimum traffic filter to an SEOT of 10 or above.

And then, there’s a little manual labor…

Remove any keywords that you see as being irrelevant to your core theme by clicking the “X” on the far right hand side of the keyword. And you’ll be left with a nice list of relevant, valuable, high traffic, low competition keywords – like I have above.

Article Keyword Research

Click on the key icon beside any of your category keywords it to open it up in a new tab – and do some more keyword research to find content topic areas within each category.

For this step, it’s handy to use the Google Search Keywords option, as well as the Google Synonym Tool with the “Ignore Additional” option selected. This will give you a nice “long tail” list of topics.

The next step is researching and creating web-site content in each one of these topic areas.

But how do you research these topic areas?

Find Content: Research or Republish

Market Samurai’s “Find Content” module is purpose-designed for this!

It was built to research the content that is already published on the web to help you to write your own articles, or to find articles that you can legally republish (although check the site terms and conditions before doing this.)

Click on the key icon beside the keyword, go to the Find Content tab, and begin research.

We can analyze the content based on authority factors here.

Content that has high PageRanks, Backlinks and Age might be a sign of good quality information – and a good article to research before writing your own article on the same topic.

Content that has low PageRank, Backlinks and Age might be content that you can republish on your site for testing the niche (because writing content is one of the most time-consuming parts of setting up a niche web-site) – and see if you can get rankings using someone else’s article on your site (a very promising sign if you do!)

(This is something unique to Market Samurai. I’m yet to come across any other software that analyzes the authority of a piece of content in this way.)

Next, we need links…

Get High-Quality Backlinks

Finding backlinks is easy. Focusing on the high-quality backlinks, the ones that will give you the best result for your time and effort, is difficult.

The Promotion module helps here, by showing the PageRanks, Backlinks, and the use of Follow/Nofollow on pages where you can receive backlinks.

You’re starting to see how all of this ties-in, and how each step impacts on all of the others.

And by putting it all together, we can get faster rankings in search engines, more traffic sooner, a better return on our time and effort on SEO, and better results in the long term – with less time and effort required.

But we didn’t do it for you.

We created “Market Samurai” originally (well before we released it) because we were doing these things ourselves – and we wanted to achieve the best results, faster, with less time and effort.

The Next Step

The next step is to just do it!

Market Samurai will give you the semantic keyword relationships you need for site structuring, for internal linking, for link-building, for tagging and more if you use the keyword research procedure I’ve described above.

If you don’t have Market Samurai yet – get it. You can download a free 12-day trial here.

If your trial has expired, you’ll be able to use the Keyword Research features still – but you will need to get the full version of Market Samurai to use the other features. You can purchase Market Samurai for lifetime access to all Market Samurai features here.

As I say, these semantic site structures can help you to get better results in search engines, with far less effort, and fewer links. So I challenge you to try using them for yourself using Market Samurai, and see the results you get.

Brent