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Competition Analysis
After sleepless nights choosing keywords the next step is to learn all you can about your competition. Go to any other search engine and type in the phrases you chose to find out who’s currently holding the top position in the results. Notice that I didn’t say “go to Google”. Many people prefer to move the battleground anywhere but Google, saying that it takes forever to increase the rank there. While Google is still responsible for well over 50% of searches it might take longer to make your way with it. Google might eventually rank you well if you put your efforts on Yahoo or MSN. Again, be flexible and continually adjust your strategy.
The purpose of your research is to find out what your competitors have done in their optimization to reach the position they hold. The search engines evaluate the Onpage factors of your site for indexing; this is where you need to place your keywords to optimize the relevance. A more important aspect is Offpage factors – the links to your site from others who are related to you.
So do a search on any of your keywords and see who is number one in the results to start onpage analysis.
Pay attention to the following:
First note if it is a main page or a subpage. In case of a subpage your home page optimization might look more valuable to the searcher. Also note:
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The Page Rank of a page
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Meta tags
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Keyword usage, density and locations
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Emphasized keywords, that is header tags, bold, italic etc
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Related links
The offpage factors are inbound links to the site from other sites. These are easy to find, just do a search for “link:www.mycompetitor.com” (no quotes). Replace “mycompetitor” with your cometitor’s site. The search may bring thousands of links. Well, don’t be scared. We’ll talk more about offpage factors later, but for now remember that generally only the links from relevant sites will help a site rank. SpyFu is a good free tool to help you do competition research.