Understanding How the Density of Social Networks Influences Search Engine Marketing

In the search market a guy like Danny Sullivan has such a dominant marketshare that he will never be replaced until he decides to retire. He...

• blogs almost every day
• produces conferences
• features other well known people in the industry as guest writers on his site or as speakers at his conferences
• has built relationships in the industry for over a decade
• gets exclusive news from some of the search companies

In that sort of marketplace you would simply have to accept ranking at best #2. But how hard would it be to get to #2 or #3 in the search space? How many people are really well known? Wikipedia lists only 8 people in their list of SEO professionals. There are a couple people who should be listed there who are not - Rand Fishkin is certainly well enough known to be listed there, and while John Battelle is not known as an SEO he is certainly well associated with search. But for as competitive as search and as much as people talk about it every day there are really only a few dozen people who have significant exposure in the SEO space.

Some of the most profitable marketplaces are worth billions of dollars, but many aspects of the Internet (including search result rankings for competitive keywords) follow traditional power laws - where the winner takes most. But some networks with many competitors also have few central supports.

If the competition has more money than you, a bigger brand than you, and has been around for years it at first glance it can seem like building citations / references / relationships will be time consuming and perhaps futile, but if competitors in the network do not get along well and actively engage in cross-promotion then it is easy for a newcomer to enter the field with a different strategy and compete. Most markets are not as online focused as the SEO community is, so if you understand the social aspects of online marketing and a bit of SEO you can plow past the competition.

You can't beat somebody by following in their footsteps, but some effective competitive advantages might include...

• using ego and relevancy to appeal to other related markets with large audiences
• publishing an informational only site that promotes the industry in general, such that competitors are unaware of the competitive threat until you have already beat them
• creating content that is easy for people to understand, writing in a way that people who speak in inside baseball do not
• using a different content format than most people in your industry - blogs are amazing link building tools
• targeting keyword areas that the competition miss
• creating definitive market leading niche content that shows ownership over ideas where most competing content is weak
• a strong domain name that matches your keywords
• different content licensing strategies and usage licenses (ie: open source software)

Almost every market (in spite of how competitive it seems at first glance) has major holes in it. What are you doing to capitalize on those holes and build market leverage for your website?