How to Analyze Your Online Competition
Written on December 31, 2008 – 11:42 pm | by Guru
Increase your search engine marketing by analyzing your competition. When you analyze your completion, you are looking into their website and results to see how they reached the desired goals and most importantly how they get all that traffic! Read on to find ways to conduct your research.
URL Structure: Look at the way your competitor constructed their URL. Is it static or dynamic? Does in use words to describe the business or services is provided? What makes their URL different from the rest?
Meta Data: One should analyze the Meta Data of the competitor’s website. Emphasis should be given in finding out the meta keywords that are incorporated in the meta data of the pages. Are they visible in the title and description for the page One should also check if the meta keywords are visible in the title and description of the particular webpage.
Site Map: Easy internal navigation is important when it comes to lifting ranks. Search engines use site maps to crawl websites, making their tasks, and your results a lot easier. For this reason, you should use text-based links to navigate to the internal pages.
Link Popularity: Link Popularity is the key for the success of the website. It is recommended to inspect the number of quality links that links back to your competitor’s website. A number of legitimate links in the website of the competitor will help in the higher rank on the specific targeted keywords since search give weightage to the websites with high link popularity. This will help you to plan strategies by which you gain visibility on the keywords and generate the traffic.
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.
Home Page PR: Google uses a tool called the Google Page Rank. With this Google assigns a score of 0-10 to asses a webpage’s value. The number of links that point to the website and its current ranking is what gives this tool its outcome. The rating can be checked using the Google toolbar or PRChecker.
Strongest Pages: There are a few online SEO tools that provide strongest pages tools, which show important pages on a domain. One of these being SEOmoz. The number of links that point to the website and the pages current rankings is what it goes by. By using this method, you can see which pages are causing high rankings. It can give you a better idea of the type of content you need to produce similar results.
Now that you have the methods in which to analyze your competitors, do some research and put in some person-hours. Tell your web desinger to explore your top competition and combine each of their best efforts to give you the step up.
Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo
