SEO & Competition Analysis Part One

Analyzing your competition should be the second step taken during the SEO process (right after and sometimes even during keyword selection). Looking at what and how your competition have positioned their website where you want yours to be placed will lend great insight into how to get yours there. The above statement should not be taken as meaning that early in the campaign is the only time that competition analysis is important. Once you are holding a top position your competition will undoubtedly renew their efforts to take back what you have replaced. Competition analysis is a step that must be taken to find out what you need to do to take a top position but which also should be performed periodically to detect your competitor's efforts to take back "their" former positions. In this article we will cover onsite factors which must be considered and in part two we will cover external factor analysis including incoming links, anchor text, PageRank, etc. Onsite Factors Onsite factors of your website are the easiest to address as they are factors which are under your complete control. You have the power to change anything within your site from the content, internal linking structure, and even the design structure itself. Key onsite factors that must be considered in competition analysis are: Titles and meta tags Keyword density and content Special formats and positioning There are many tools that are available to help you determine what the optimal levels are. Generally these are knows as KDA (Keyword Density Analysis) tools. Of all of them there is one that we use at Beanstalk that we have found provides better, more accurate information than the others and that is past article on table structures and will be covered in a future mini-series on W3C complaint and search engine friendly design, to be published in September. 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 that 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. With positioning the job is a bit more difficult to assess. One of the best ways to quickly isolate how your competitors have used special formats and where they have positioned there 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. Conclusion As with any competition, if you understand what those who have what you want are doing it becomes a matter of doing the same and then adding 10% to your efforts. In the case of onsite optimization you'll simply want to duplicate the best of the top ten, in part two on external factors you will be doing the 10% more. Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning, Inc. One of the few SEO & web design review and