Can you Outperform Sites Like Amazon or Wikipedia?
Roy
Do you think Amazon or EBay is your competitor just because you have started a new product-selling website and those products are sold in Amazon and EBay too?
Think twice, Amazon or EBay may be too big for you to fight (in respect to size, age and popularity).
Do you think About.com or Wikipedia is your competitor just because you are selling the same information?
Think twice, About.com or Wikipedia may be too big for you to fight (in respect to size, age and popularity).
However, if you are strategic enough, they do not have any chance to stand in the competition.
Reality check:
Situation - 1: You are fighting with big brands with huge authority like EBay, Amazon, About.com or Wikipedia
Wrong. You are actually competing with one or two pages of those websites. Though those one or two pages have trust value of such great domains, at the end of the day, they are actually single pages.
Situation - 2: They are the best sources of information.
Partially correct but (there is a BIG BUT) in most of the cases they are not well optimized. Moreover, there is nothing like “best source” - you can often offer better information package than Wikipedia if you concentrate more on specific information needs of your visitors. To add to this, many pages of Amazon and EBay are full of duplicate content (especially pages with seller-generated content). So, how they can be the best?
Situation - 3: Those domains are very old and got huge trust rank.
True but (there is a BIG BUT) if you outnumber them with inbound links, domain age would not be a problem. You may say that they have gathered thousands of links in many years and it would be very tough to outnumber them. True but do you really think all those links have targeted anchor text. Check out for yourself. You got good chances.
Situation - 4: People often visit those websites directly
Partially True but (there is a BIG BUT) most of the visitors for a competitive keywords use Google to find them the best page and if you can rank top for those keywords, you will not need to worry about visitor count.
Endnote: bigger sites have bigger problems and a niche mini site can easily outperform them by exploiting those holes. All you need is a good and flexible strategy. Count on SEO - it is still the best.
Posted on: Friday, August 15, 2008 at 4:17 pm 
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