Understand Your Internet Competition

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: 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.

Meta Data: Look at the competitor’s website and take notice of the Meta Data. What keywords are given emphasis and incorporated in the Meta data of the webpage’s? Are the keywords located in the title and description of the page? Which ones stand out to you? In addition, which ones are brining in the traffic?

Site Map: Google uses the site map to crawl and retrieve data from different websites. By using text-based links that lead to the internal pages of the site, Google is able to crawl the site with ease and in return boosting ranks. By also using a clear and correctly indexed site map on your domain, you can make it easier to get Google and other search engines to crawl and index your site.

Link Popularity: The keys to a successful website are link popularity. You are advised to examine how many legitimate and quality links lead back to your competitor’s website. Having quality links to competitor’s sites will help you rank higher with certain targeted keywords. Search engines give more power to site that have high link popularity. Knowing this can help you plan and use the best keywords, increase traffic and gain visibility.

Site Age: The older your website, the more influence is has in search engine rankings. You can’t fake a website age. So do the research and get your site registered as soon as possible to help yourself with the ranking later down the line.

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 – It is the Google Page Rank. Google gives a 0-10 score for assessing the value of the webpage. This is generally dependent on the quality and quantity of incoming links. It is the most popular metric for all the webmasters to check. It can be checked by the Google Toolbar or a site like 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.