Help: what is my competitor doing right?

[ppayne]

My company, www.jlist.com, does fairly well in the searches. However, we're often beaten by our competitor, cdjapan dot com, when searching for the names of Japanese swimsuit idols, etc. that we both sell. Some examples where they have the #1 position:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ka&btnG=Search

http://www.google.com/search?q=Saya+...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

I'd just like someone to help me understand what they're doing right? I believe they are beating me because they have product listings with no descriptions, whereas I have pages that have full descriptions, explaining the background of the models and giving cultural information. I believe they're beating me on keyword density for this reason -- i.e., x % of the keywords on their page are "Sanae Akasaka" but that percent is lower in my case, since I have lots of unrelated descriptive sentences. (A pretty lame situation IMHO -- this also happens with Japanese pages that have just the names of Japanese models in English, the pages get top rank for having 100% keyword density for that name, even though the page is useless to most surfers.)

Any other pointers from the floor?

[OpenYourEyes]

I'm pretty sure that keyword density is pretty far down in the factors Google uses to rank websites. The most important factor is what they're beating you at.....links.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l....cdjapan.co.jp

They've got over 7,000 incoming links, while you have just over 1,000.

Also your website relies on graphics for most of its navigation. You should have navigation to every page via text links too. These links should use well targeted link anchor text as well.

[Heal3r]

Most of their links are from their own pages. I didnt look at all 7000, but thas my general opinions.

high quality links, and get in the top directories-


And goodness it takes a while for the page to load. I have a T1 line.
Could you cram any more onto your home page?

And my first view of the home page is that you take credit cards ;)

Consider some visitor capturing content perhaps?
Your competitors home page has a lot more appeal to me than yours...sorry friend. Very well written copy comes across proff while yours has a more (guy in his basement" feel.

It doesn't appear to me that your page with Sanae Akasaka is even indexed by Google. I can't see why. But I also can't see why the 2 paragraphs of information create a 20 ft page ;)

Sometimes the fixes come not from the seo tweakings but the customer centric tweakings. In the end, especially with google, they will end up being the same thing.

Best of luck truly, I hope this sparks some ideas.

Links, directory submissions, excellent content. And reporting your spamming competition for spam. These are the things that make me smile ;)