Analyze Your Competitors Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 19 of June , 2008 at 7:43 am

The object of a search engine optimization campaign is to get to the top of the search results pages for chosen keywords. To get to the top infers there is a list and that list is made up of all the sites on the web that are using those keywords. To get to the top of that list, you need to know who you are competing against and how well their search engine optimization program is.

The search engines themselves make this task fairly easy to undertake. The first step is to identify who you opposition is. A simple search on your keywords will list the top results for that keyword. Select the top three or four sites and concentrate your search engine optimization research on them.

There is a whole host information that can be collected, however I will just concentrate on a couple of these. The first is to determine the number of pages on the website that use all the words from your phrase; and the number of web pages on the website that use your exact keyword phrase. These are the keywords that have obviously been used in their search engine optimization strategies.

Finding this information is not difficult:

site:www.sitename.com keyword phrase
site:www.sitename.com “keyword phrase”

To find the number of links into a site, use Yahoo!’a http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.

Finally, visit various social sites to see whether or not they have a presence and if so, how active they are. Sites like Technorati can also be a valuable resource if they utilize blogs.

Once you have collated all this information, you will have some idea as to how active their search engine optimization programs. You will know how many pages they have that rank for your keywords and how many inbound link they may have. Your search engine optimization strategy is not so much to outdo them in quantity but in quality. Match their quantities when it comes to ranked pages and inbound links and you will be in a position to outrank them.

                      Category: SEO                      

No comments yet.