Over 85% of web traffic is generated by search engines, which makes optimizing your website for the search engines absolutely crucial. It also means that you need to be aware of what your competitors are doing, what web ranking their sites have, and how they are achieving that ranking. If you are not in the first thirty to fifty results for your chosen keywords, your site will be very hard to find, so keeping up with your competitors in terms of web rankings is essential.
Once you have decided which keywords you want to focus on when optimizing your website, you can type these into the major search engines to produce a list of who your main competitors are. Perhaps you want to research the top twenty or so results. Taking a look at their web ranking and analyzing how they have achieved that ranking can help you to plan your own marketing strategy.
Choose your analysis methods
There are a number of ways you can undertake competitor analysis depending on your budget. There are companies that will analyze your competitors' web rankings for you for a fee, and there are also pieces of software or web based tools that you can buy or download to do the analysis yourself. You can also undertake basic analysis using the tools that search engines provide you with.
Basic web page analysis using Google
Take Google for example. Although Google is reducing the amount of information available about competitor sites, there are still a number of things you can find out about a page on a competitor's site purely by using the functionality on the Google Toolbar. These include:
1. The Page Rank Google has awarded to each webpage
2. The number of times the keyword you have searched for appears on that webpage
3. How the keywords are used
4. The keywords used in the meta tags for that webpage
5. The number and source of back links to the webpage
Quality links can dictate a website's ranking
The final point relating to back links is a crucial one in search engine optimization today. To a large degree, the ranking of a website is governed by the number of other sites that are linking to it, as well as the ranking of those sites. If one of your competitors has a particularly high web ranking, it may be that they have managed to get some back links form recognized authority sites.
Getting an idea of your competitor's back links can be as simple as taking a look at their 'links' page. If they have published a link to another site, there is a good chance it is a reciprocal arrangement, and they have a back link from the same site. If you see sites that are relevant to your subject or product, that have a good web ranking, you can always approach them to ask them to link to your site.
Additional elements to analyze on your competitors' sites
While you are analyzing your competitors' sites, there are a number of additional items you can look at as well as their web ranking. These include the effectiveness of the homepage, the ease of navigation around the site, the usefulness and organization of content, and the overall performance of the site, including the speed of loading. Customers are more likely to return to a site that is well organized and easy to navigate, so you want to be sure you are keeping up with your competitors in this respect.


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