SEO & Competition Analysis - Part One by Dave Davies
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.
<strong>Onsite Factors</strong>
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:
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Titles and meta tags
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Keyword density and content
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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
Total Optimizer Pro by TopNet Solutions. The reason we chose this one
above the others is twofold. First, it provides very easy to read and thorough
information that can be analyzed quickly and second, they have built in tools
to analyze offsite factors to a level that don't exist in other software.
Essentially this means for you that a single tool can basically give you the
recipe you will need to take and hold your position in the top ten.
<strong>Title And Meta Tags</strong>
While meta tags definitely don't hold the weight they once did they are
certainly worth adding to your site given that they take seconds to add. Titles
on the other hand hold significant weight and must be created carefully to
insure that they hold maximum SEO effectiveness and also that they appeal to
the searchers.
In analyzing the titles and meta tags essentially you are looking for the
optimal keyword density of those tags. A KDA tool will let you know what
percentage of your competitions tags are made up of the targeted keywords. A
good KDA tool will also display the range or average of percentages. Due to
their low weight, meta tags don't have to be given quite the attention that
titles do. 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 (though not over) 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.
Google at least and probably the other major engines as well have or will be
adding into the ranking algorithm a function that records the number of times a
specific link is clicked when it appears in the results. If your site appears
in the top of the results but is not click at a rate that is acceptable for
that position your website will slip. Like any other marketing tool, your title
tag is the gateway from the search engine results to your website: insure
you've created an attractive welcome mat.
<strong>Keyword Density And Content</strong>
There has been much discussion over the years as to whether there even is an
optimal keyword density or whether density even matters. While there are
intelligent SEO's out there who would disagree, the entire debate seems obvious
to us at least. If the search engines are looking at onsite factors at all
(which they are) 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.
That said, and like the titles, it is not about cramming in keywords anywhere to
boost the density in your content. Using a KDA tool to find the optimal density
for your industry will give you a good idea of any content changes you may need
to make. From here you will want to look at two additional areas of your
competitors sites. One which you can get from an advances KDA tool such as
Total Optimizer Pro and the other you can get right from the engines
themselves. Which brings us to ...
<strong>Special Formats And Positioning</strong>
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 (and
sometimes these can be two very different things). This topic was touched on in
a
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.
<strong>Conclusion</strong>
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.
About the Author
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning Inc. Beanstalk is
a guaranteed SEO firm that insures
top positioning on the major search engines.
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