How to Analyze Your SEO Competition
First of all, remember that competition is good for any business. It’s what keeps you growing, and also keeps you innovative. It stops your business from becoming stale. You have to strive to be one step ahead of your competition, and the best way to do that is to know what he/she is all about. To do this you must analyze your competitor and if you do this well, then you will only serve to enhance your search engine marketing. Here is an analytical format that you may find useful. Don’t think that you are doing something deceitful or unfair. It’s not like you are stealing secrets. You are learning from someone else’s success. There are no secrets to educating oneself in any field or industry. In addition, you are not doing anything that your competitor won’t do, and probably is doing. This knowledge is helping them to keep ahead of the competition.
URL Structure: Firstly find out how the URL of the competitor looks, whether they are static/dynamic, whether they are written with words giving a brief idea about the content of the webpage.
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.
Site Age -A website’s age is a major factor that influences its rank it in the search engines.
Pages indexed – It refers to the number of webpages that are listed in the search engines index. The top ranking websites can be indexed easily by the popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
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.
Observing the strongest pages: You can use a search engine optimization tool, like SEOmoz to find out what are considered the strongest pages on a website. Strongest meaning the most important. This is dependant on the amount of links pointing to that particular site in combination with page rankings. If you obtain this information it will tell you what specific content is working for them. If you really take the time to analyze all of the information you have gathered ,through this competitors analysis, you will really know what is giving your competitor the lead. The next step is to incorporate all of the positive aspects into your very own site.
Looking to find the best information on Search Engine Optimisation, then visit www.aplus.net.nz to find the best advice on SEO Web Hosting for you.