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. 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 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.</p

Dave Davies
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/seo-competition-analysis-part-one-2421.html