Understand Your Web Competition

One of the essential things you can do to enhance your search engine marketing is to study your competitors. Analyzing the competition will open new avenues of success in the industry. The strategy is similar in the web world. The following are the ways to analyze the competition: 

URL Structure: Take notice of competitors URL’s. Are they static or dynamic? Do they give meaning or explain the company. What makes it stand out?

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: 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: 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.

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, 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: SEO tools, such as SEOmoz, provide a strongest pages tool, which shows the most important pages on the domain. By using this tool you can get a better idea of which parts of your competitors domain are the ones creating all the traffic for them. In addition, in turn what you need to do to mirror those results in your favor.

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.