[meader83]

Just been studying a competitor of mine (UKofficeonline.co.uk), looking at all its backlinks in yahoo! explorer and the general page content.

These are the guys everyone want to compete with and they are always on page one for all the big keywords ('Office Supplies' being the holy grail).

Nearly all there anchor text is their company name apart from a handful, they currently have about 281 inbound links, approx 50 reciprocal, and nearly all from directories not necessarily high PR.

Not even sure if the website is SEO'd that well but what do i know, im a novice.

My site has about 80 odd inlinks at present and i think i have relevent pages and am concentration heavily on my link-building now, particularly from high PR and relevent quality sites.

So do i just need to better what they have to emulate my competitor and i'll be up there? or am i missing a trick here

[RedEvo]

Their site isn't SEO optimised. It is however all about their customers where IMHO yours is more about you. I'd consider changing this focus. I'm not really interested in the fact that you are the 'the office supplies people' or that you have 20,000 products. I want to know if you sell what I need and I want to know the price.

Just my point of view you understand.

d

[sally]

I have exactly the same issue with my competitors, check out this thread it's long but some good advice on it:

Is organic link building a waste of time?

[PremierPDS]

Just had a quick look at both sites... I agree with Dave on this- your competitors site makes it so much easier for customers to find what they're looking for- it's there in your face where as your site makes things a little obscure with your products hiding in the nav menu at the top. I'm in the process of having my site rebuilt and intend to set my homepage out very similar to ukofficeonline to make things as easy as poss for the customer to find

[awebapart]

Google uses around 200 factors to determine how to rank sites for given search terms, so there could be many reasons why one site is higher than another for a term like "office supplies".

A lot can be influenced by inbound links, but to analyse the quality, not quantity, of inbound links of a site can take time, so I wont comment on this. I will however comment on a few more immediate issues:

1. Your competitor has 15000 pages of office supply product information on their site, whereas you have 100 pages - again size/quantity isn't everything, since the number 1 site has 1100 pages , but content is important

2. Your competitor has one of the search term's keywords in their domain name whereas you have none, (the site that is number one on google has both and just that)

3. With your competitor, there may be some jiggery-pokery going on with not just the one site but also with another site ukofficedirect.co.uk which at first glance looks very similar but has more history going back to 2002, and a whole host of other similar domain names like ukofficedirect.com going back to 2001

4. Your competitor, according to yahoo, has a lot more inbound links than you have mentioned, and not just to the one site but to its other sites too (which may in turn help ukofficeonline). The number 1 site on google has less inbound links which can demonstrate that it is not just about quantity but quality.

5. I really don't know whether staples are inadvertently shooting themselves in the foot with this, but I have noticed that staples are listing their competitors at the bottom of their page which might be helping the site which is no 1 and ukofficedirect (which may in turn help ukofficeonline)

So to answer your original question... no, it is never that easy.

[PremierPDS]

How do you know how or how can you check how many web pages a site has? Does the more pages a site has make any difference SEO wise and if so why?

[Dotwhack]

Originally Posted by PremierPDS

How do you know how or how can you check how many web pages a site has? Does the more pages a site has make any difference SEO wise and if so why?

type this into google search bar
site:<your url>
i.e. Site:www.dotwhack.co.uk

It'll show all the pages it's indexing.

[PremierPDS]

Thanks Danielle, always wondered how they knew that, another mystery solved lol!

[PremierPDS]

Hmmm, it not showing any of mine??? Can you think of any reason why this might be?

[awebapart]

Originally Posted by PremierPDS

Does the more pages a site has make any difference SEO wise and if so why?

No not directly, but indirectly things like the amount of unique and relevant content, and the internal page ranking structure, is important.