As a whitehat SEO how do you manage in a highly competative market?

[adriandg]

I have a competator that has literally hundreds of sites like this:

http://www.wire-shelf.com/tag/cleaning/

that don't have a huge amount of page authority, but he is getting citations out of all of them.  The site is obviously useless, and just a place for some SEO company to keep adding more links to their various clients, and creating google citations for them at the same time.

Once you have filled out your information on every single local database and obtained all the legit citations you can, your competitors are still beating you by having more citations, from various sites like the one above.

Is there any way to stay whitehat and actually succeed? or should i just follow suit, and make 100 crappy websites full of crap and put links in them.  seems silly, but it seems like the only way to compete these days.

[dignan99]

Hi...

I definitely can understand how frustrating it is to be in such a competitive market and industry, especially when people seem to be using blue/gray/blackhat type of strategies that seem to be pushing them ahead.

My best advice is to stay the course and know that these get to the top quick schemes will eventually be dealt with by the major search engines.

In the meantime, try to learn as much as you can about:

Organic SEO techniques

Local SEO techniques

Social Media Marketing

Genuine link building, which includes building relationships with local businesses, communities, and blogs.

Building relationships with your customer base

You have to start somewhere, and like I have said before, Rome was not built in a day.  So work on each strategy, and move on to the next.  By the time you are done many of the search engines will have caught up to your work and your rankings should improve.

SEOmoz is a fantastic place to start, from the beginner seo guides, to the forum posts.  If you think this will take too much time, consider becoming a client of one of the pros.

Best of luck

[RyanKent]

Looking at the wire-shelf.com page, it does not cross the line to black hat at all.

Yes, it is clearly articles written for the sole purpose of providing links to their site. The articles are long enough and written well enough (not great, but ok) to pass a test of whether it is legitimate content.

With that understood, the page is very low quality. It has 5000 links from 7 sources. The page has about 10 different articles on it. The page is full of Google ads, many of which are to competing storage companies. What this page does primarily is offer a low quality link to your competitor.

We all hope that Google will catch up at some point and be able to eliminate these type of sites in the form of another Panda-style update. It will happen at some point and when it does you will keep your ranking, while your competitor will drop like a stone.

In the mean time it cannot be hard to beat this particular tactic. If you take the time to write one quality article and it gets picked up by a dozen quality sites, the traffic and link value your article would offer will outweigh all the crappy articles like this from your competitor.

[MBayes]

We all feel your pain. Looking at the local landscape of SEO firms in our market you see a lot of this. Ryan and Dignan99  have it right I think.  Five or six great links will overcome all the spammy stuff.

Look at great content ideas.  Do a day of out of the box thinking about on site content that will draw a crowd. Use the standard content ideas to start  ( Tips, Forums, Contests, Opinion, events).  You need real sites to notice you and real traffic to overcome the less imaginative but prolific 4000 links to a url crowd.

In my experience it takes components of at least three for this type strategy, meaning not just the content, but the distribution of it, and the  promotion of it. All three areas have to be good.  Where throwing together a bunch of low quality sites is a component of one thinking.  Low quality linking and SEO (Like most things I suppose) are symptoms of taking the easy road, and the course of least resistance.

So,  not only can you write some great content ( or have a professional do it)  that will draw some attention, but you can also promote that content through ad words for a short period, and face book ads, with a very targeted campaign to the bloggers and movers and shakers in the Industry.

It's the old my blender can blend an i pad thought process.  I bet if you really find something interesting and unique to demonstrate on the site, promote it well, and distribute the information in a thoughtful targeted manner, you can and will out rank the dark forces.