How to Analyze Your SEO Competition

One of the essential things you can do to enhance your search engine marketing is to study your competitors. Analyzing the competition will open new avenues of success in the industry. The strategy is similar in the web world. The following are the ways to analyze the competition:

Determine if the URL’s are static/dynamic. How do they look to you? Can you tell what the competitor’s web site is about just by reading the URL’s ? Are they straight to the point and are they search engine friendly?

What does the Meta Data tell you?: Determine what key words are showing the meta data. Now compare these with the first page title and description. Can you see the same keywords there?

Locate the site map. You need to see how well laid out the site navigation is. It should be quick and easy to get from one area to another. The links to the various pages should be text links. These are the types of links that the major search engines prefer. It is well worth the time to plan your navigation properly. There are some areas that you can rush in your website building but this is one area that you will to really devote some attention to.

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.

See how many pages the competition has on their site. Now determine how many of those pages have been indexed with the major search engines. Google, MSN and Yahoo are quite easily able to index top ranking sites.

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.

Strongest Pages – A few online SEO tools like SEOmoz provides “strongest pages” tool which will show the important pages on the domain. It depends upon the number of links pointing to the website and the current rankings. This gives you an idea of what content on their domain is causing the high rankings. It will provide you a brief idea about what content on the domain is pushing them to get higher ranks.

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