Domain Authority Question

[azguy]

So in looking at my first campaign with 3 of my top competitors, I have a domain authority of 65, and my competitors are 31, 43, and 38 and yet all of them outrank me by quite a bit.

How can I take this research and make some sense of it to beat them in rankings?

Thanks!

[azguy]

That's a bold assumption. But I'll make not of it.

[nwinternetmarketing]

My best bet is that you're using an old, out-dated version of osCommerce.  At any rate, I would venture that you're code is horrendous.

Remove all nested tables, inline css, inline js, combine and minify all external files etc.

[azguy]

Here's the thing

I have an ecommerce site, so I"m trying to figure out how to get more valuable content (text) on homepage, product pages, etc. Any ideas?

Also, I do have over 100 unique articles and over 100 blog posts that are internally linked on site linked from home via an articles link and blog link, so is that the kind of content you are referring too?

[azguy]

Yeah, the anchor text backlinks are quite important to rank specific pages and keywords.

[azguy]

Will do! Thanks!

[EGOL]

whispering

I think that this is an academic question... and academic questions usually do not produce revenue.  Just an opinion.  I would work on content instead.

[NFI]

Hi Azguy, we had a similar problem and found a simple fix, The keywords we were outranked for with the competitiors were mainly their anchor text for their backlinks. The backlinks we focussed on where not as emphasized as our competitors. P.S nice going with 65, keep up the good work

[RyanPurkey]

You'll want to look at more than just domain authority and instead address things more granularly.  Look at your top pages according to OSE of your site and compare how they're aligned with your targeted keywords.  Also, check the backlinks of those competitors and see where they're getting links that you're not. (http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect)  On site, you should check things like navigation (do you have clearly labeled, keyword targeted navigation, or is it locked up in flash), does your site load without javascript turned on, do you have any weird redirects in place (302, javascript, etc), are your site URLs full of session variables, and so on.

[Theo-NL]

You could have a look at the full rapports as generated by the keyword difficulty tool by SEOmoz.

It provides a pretty complete pictures of many of the factors at play (on-page optimization, inlinking data, anchor text distribution, etc.) and might help you to figure out what is causing these lower DA domains to outrank you.