Competition Spying Pays Off!

About two months ago I did some spying on my competition to see how they placed so well on Google. I found one thing that was definitely different and that was how they used a generic title in their code. For instance every product or category title at the top of the bar read out: "Buy Ireland Shirts, Purchase Irish Tees, Ireland Shirts For Sale." I asked about this here and everyone agreed that it seemed a little out there. Well I took 10 of my category pages and product pages and did the same thing. Then every week or so I used the keyword position tool to see where I ranked. At first only 2 of those 10 were in the top 100.. Gradually over the last few weeks I gained some momentum. Now perhaps with the new updated taking place the rankings are all in the top 100 except for 2. Not bad and very encouraging. Most of the rankings also broke the top 50, one even gaining up to the # 4 spot.

Very interesting. When you say "generic title" do you mean that they used the same title on all pages of their site?

Yes lhhgbh, I too have the same query...and another thing if you could please help me out....
what kind of 'spying' you did on your competitor??

Haven't understood exactly what you meant by that, maybe if you could answer Cataclysmic's question we could better understand that.

Yet, from what I have understood, it doesn't sound very "good", it has a slight taste of spam. I could be wrong thought because as said, I haven't understood exactly what you meant .

Some words are used several times in the title which is something I would avoid. It is possible to make the title more attractive to people to improve the CTR, but otherwise, it is alright to me. Not spammy enough to sound the alarms, IMHO.

Of course, I would definitely use different titles for each page and include the respective product name or category.

Hello Folk

We are not getting your points. what exact you wanna say,,

Thats gr8, you are getting the rankings for your website..

Can we see the website url.. so that we can help you more in better way...

Thxs
Pws

Okay the site sells flag shirts so each country category uses the example I mentioned above, yet changing the countries name.

Interesting observation. Are you saying that only the country name changes in title tags for different pages or that specific country segments have identical title tags and a ranking well.

Following a competitior in terms of Title and Backlinks is a good option to work on.. I always try to follow my competitor backlinks and get some from the same sources as well.

Even title can be manipulated accordingly, it surely helps.. but upto some extent.. right after it lands you somewhere, it becomes really tough from that point onwards to rise up..

Then you are left totally dependent on the Content..

Sometimes following the leader does not hurt. Same goes for all areas of web marketing. I think once you get the name/brand recognition then you have to be the one with the fresh new ideas to market your site.

I think the idea is sound. I ranked a site for #1 in two weeks one time just by not only registering my search term for the domain name, but putting it in the title tag, H1 tags, making the term bold and italic on the page.

Of course the fact that there was less than 1000 results for the search term helped out quite a bit. :-)

Those are all very basic and simple ideas that ring true as far as SEO work goes. Changing your title tag and repeating the keyword in there might be a little risky, but shouldn't get you banned that is for sure.


Fred

Great post we are going to try it with some of products.

Yeah the title is all the same with the exception of changing the country names. As I said this might not be for everyone, but I definitely tested it first.. Nothing is for certain when it comes to this stuff. Even the pros will tell you that. I would advise just really studying the competitors sites. As I said it was just one thing that I noticed about their site that really just stood out.