SEO Competition
Competition is both a challenge and an opportunity in business. Competition analysis is a step that must be taken not only to find out what you need to
do to take a top position, but also to detect your competitor's efforts to take back "their" former positions.
When performing competitive research, the goals are to discover:
How entrenched a competitor is and how hard it is to unseat them.
The competition’s SEO skills.Link prospects, so you can trade links, host articles and do reviews.
The factors that must be considered in competition analysis are:
Titles and Meta tagsKeyword density and contentSpecial formats and positioning
Title and Meta Tags
In analyzing the titles and Meta tags essentially you are looking for the optimal keyword density of those tags. You need to know what percentage of your
competitor’s tags are made up of the targeted keywords. Meta tags don't have to be given the attention that titles do, Due to their low weight. When you are
optimizing your titles you will want to insure that you fall somewhere near the middle of the pack. Hopefully in your industry, the top ten sites have relatively
close percentages in which case it is easy to determine what the optimal percentage is, however assuming that they don't, you will want to gear your title tag
to something that falls in the upper end of the range of densities and also keep that title interesting to the searcher who will see it as the link to your site in the search results.
Like any other marketing tool, your title tag is the gateway from the search engine results to your website. Therefore you should insure that you have created an attractive one.
Keyword Density and Content
There has been much discussion over the years as to whether there even is an optimal keyword density or whether density even matters. If the search engines are looking at these
factors at all and looking for relevancy then it naturally follows that there is a percentage of your content that can consist of the targeted keywords and indicate to the engines
that your site is relevant for a given phrase.
Special Formats And Positioning
Special formats will be considered content elements such as bold, colors, anchor text, or any other content characteristics that sets specific text out as different when a
search engine is spidering your site. Positioning refers to the position of the keywords in relation to the entire content on a given page. Aside from this type of positioning there
is also the consideration of how the content and keywords are positioned relative to the code of the page.
Special formats such as bold, colors, italics, highlights, etc. set specific content aside as more important than the rest. The use of these formats, provided that it is done
correctly, can not only help improve the rankings of your website for specific phrases but can also enhance the usability of your website in general by drawing the human eye to key
content. This is not to say that you should bold, highlight and color every instance of your targeted phrase but rather use these elements to draw the eye to the key content you are most
interested in getting read.
One of the best ways to quickly isolate how your competitors have used special formats and where they have positioned their keywords in relation to the entire page is to simply .
run a search for the phrases on Google and view the cache of the page. The keywords will be highlighted in a variety of colors and will allow you to quickly glance through their page
and isolate what special elements they are using and where they have positioned their keywords on the page. You will want to do this for the top 10 competitors.
To fully grasp how your competitors are ranking highly for your targeted phrases you will want to know a number of things about the links to their site including:
How many links do they have?How many of these links come from the same sites?Are these sites relevant?What is the PageRank distribution of the links?
Are these links image or text links?
Why Are These Factors Important?
These factors are important as they define the value of the link. The number of links is perhaps the least important of these factors. A site can have 10,000 incoming links and .
if they are all from a single unrelated site with a low Page Rank then the value of these links is negligible.
Knowing how many of the links to your competitor's site come from the same site or sites will let you know where they have bought advertising and also help isolate weakness in their
link counts. Multiple links from the same website are not given the same value as multiple links from different websites. If your competitors have thousands of incoming links that come
from 5 different websites you have far less work to do that if they even had a couple hundred, all from different sites.
You can easily do this by following these simple steps:
The first step is to isolate which domains the links are coming from. The more links coming from a few domains are, the better and this indicates that the competition is lower than
a pure link-count would indicate. Moving on from there we look to the Page Rank breakdown of the links. The higher the numbers of high Page Rank links, the more difficult the competition is.
However, once you have isolated which domains the links are coming from it is often simply a matter of visiting the site and establishing the same links to yours either through exchanges,
directory listings, or other tactics.
While you are on the sites, assess whether the content is relevant. You will undoubtedly not want to visit each and every page that links to your competitors however if you visit all
the top sites, you will get a very solid idea of the relevancy value of the links. Once we know the value in regards to relevancy of the content we now need to know what they're doing
in regards to transferring that relevancy along in the form of their links.
While this entire process can be very time consuming, the goal here is not to save time, it is to maximize the effectiveness of the SEO performed on your site.
Also, it can be inferred that Competitive research is a serious SEO exercise for gaining advantage online. Having the tools, capabilities and expertise are not enough; you also need
to look at traditional media--print, radio and television--to learn what the competition is up to. Fight back with more pages, more content, improved design and source code, and more incoming links with diverse descriptions.