How to Analyze Your SEO Competition
Invention Development Advice - Internet Marketing
Any great battle that has ever been won, has partly been dependant on one opponent getting to know the other opponent better. The same applies in business. You must get to know your opponent, who in this case is your competitor. The best way to get to know him is to learn what he is doing right, and what is creating his success. So in other words you must do a complete analyses on the workings of their website. Here is an analytical format that may prove of some value to you in learning about your competition. It can also serve as a checklist reminder of what you should be doing to get the best search engine optimization possible.
by RobertHarvard


Any great battle that has ever been won, has partly been dependant on one opponent getting to know the other opponent better. The same applies in business. You must get to know your opponent, who in this case is your competitor. The best way to get to know him is to learn what he is doing right, and what is creating his success. So in other words you must do a complete analyses on the workings of their website. Here is an analytical format that may prove of some value to you in learning about your competition. It can also serve as a checklist reminder of what you should be doing to get the best search engine optimization possible.

The structures of the URLs: This is your starting point. Look to see if you can tell a little bit about their website just from the keywords of the URL. Also note whether they are static/dynamic.

Meta Data: One should analyze the Meta Data of the competitor's website. Emphasis should be given in finding out the meta keywords that are incorporated in the meta data of the pages. Are they visible in the title and description for the page One should also check if the meta keywords are visible in the title and description of the particular webpage.

Locating the Site Map: It is very important to have easy navigational links, which flow from one page to the other. Does the site map indicate this? By ensuring easy navigation you are allowing the search engines an easy way to crawl over the pages if they are text based links. This will in the help to boost your page rankings within the search engines.

The link backs are very important, as they should be on your site as well. There must be a good quantity of them. Quantity is not enough though, they must also be high quality links as well. The major search engines base decisions on these links. For example if they are good quality, and there are lots linking to the site, then the search engines figures the site must be good, and they will view it the same way. So when it comes time to ranking they will base their scores on these findings.

The age of your site: The search engines take a close look at the age of the websites.

Indexed Pages. These are the pages that show up on the search engines index. Those websites that are in the top rankings are easy for the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.to put in their indexes.

Nobody should ever downplay the importance of the home page. Google actually scores this page somewhere between 0-10. Again this score will be influences by the incoming links. You can check the statistics for this page on PRChecker or through the Google tool bar. It would be a wise move to do so when it comes to analyzing your competitors.

Every website should have some important pages. These are the pages where you will learn the most from in respect to the competitor's success. You can utilize an online tool like SEOmoz to help you find the information you need. Once again its going to point back to the success of the links. You are going to get a very good idea as to how strong their content is by knowing what their ranking is. Strive to make every page on your website an important one. If you set your standards high, then you will be constantly striving to meet your goals and monitor the continued growth of your site. It is very important that you do not allow your site to become stale.

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