Understand Your Internet Competition
One of the best ways to grow your search engine marketing is to take a minute to study your competitors. New paths and ideas to success will open in your industry when you analyze your competition. Below are ways to help you in analyzing the competition.
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: Analyze the Meta Data on your competitor’s website. Look for the meta keywords that they use in the meta data within the pages. Can you see them within the title and description on the page?
Site Map: Convenient internal navigation plays an important role for boosting ranks. The search engines can crawl the website easily if text based links are provided to navigate to the internal pages.
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 –A website’s age is a major factor that influences its rank it in the search engines.
Indexed Pages: This term refers to the amount of pages that are indexed within a search engine. Actually, the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN easily index top websites.
Home Page, Page Ranking: Google uses home page PR. Google assigns a score between 0-10 when assessing webpage quality and value. Usually this ranking is mainly based on the amount and quality of incoming links. This is a powerful analyzing tool. The Google toolbar or PRChecker can check it.
Strongest Pages – A few online SEO tools like SEOmoz provides “strongest pages” tool which will show the important pages on the domain. It depends upon the number of links pointing to the website and the current rankings. This gives you an idea of what content on their domain is causing the high rankings. It will provide you a brief idea about what content on the domain is pushing them to get higher ranks.
Now you have all the necessary tools to see where your competitor’s traffic comes from and with that knowledge comes much power. You can now tell your web desinger this information to increase the traffic to your own website.