SEO & Competition Analysis - Part One
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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 Total Optimizer Pro by TopNet
Solutions (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/recommended/top.htm).
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.
Title And Meta Tags
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.
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. 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
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 (and sometimes these can be two very different
things). This topic was touched on in a past article
on table structures (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/se-friendly-design/table-structure.htm)
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 (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/).
Beanstalk is a guaranteed SEO firm that insures top positioning
on the major search engines. Beanstalk would like
to thank Shawn and all the folks at TopNet Solutions for
seeking and taking our advice when adding their newest
onsite factor analysis enhancements to Total Optimizer
Pro (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/resources/recommended/top.htm). |
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