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Search Engine Optimization Starts With The Competition
from: John TourloukisAnalyzing your competition is a good place to start when
optimizing your web site for search engine placement. SEO or
search engine optimization is about topping your competition. By
looking first at web sites that rank high for your key word
phrases you will have an understanding of the time and cost
involved to have high rankings in the search engines. If you are
going after a competitive keyword phrase the amount of time
involved will dramatically increase.
When analyzing the competition, search for your keyword phrase
or phrases in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Look at the top sites and
especially look at the sites that rank high in all three of the
major search engines. You now have a list of competitor web
sites; these are your targets to pick off one by one.
Check your competitors' backlinks or links to them from other
web sites; this is going to be the best indicator of how much
effort you are going to have to put into your search engine
optimization project. You can check backlinks in Google and MSN
by typing link:www.yourdomain.com. In Yahoo you would type
link:http://www.yourdomain.com. Yahoo also has a special command
that will show you all the links to an entire web site. This can
be done by typing linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com. Now you can see
all the links to the home page and sub-pages in a web site. The
linkdomain command is the most helpful when evaluating links. Be
sure to check links in all three major search engines so you do
not miss anything. Also check backlinks on competitors
sub-pages. You will not need as many deep links but this can
make a big difference when trying to get a keyword to rank on a
sub page.
When evaluating your competitors' links, keep in mind that this
can be a link source for your web site. See if the web sites
linking to your competitors accept web site link submissions.
When submitting to other sites use your keyword phrase for your
anchor text when ever possible.
Using the Google toolbar can be helpful too when evaluating
links. Google assigns each page a page rank score based on a 1
to 10 scale with 10 being the highest. Do not solely look at a
page's page rank score; it is better that the page be on topic
rather than an irrelevant topic and a high score.
Next look at the competitors' title tags; are they using
keywords in the tag? Be sure to check the keywords tag and
description tag - I always find good keywords this way. There
are some great free SEO tools on the internet that will automate
these processes. Just do a search for free SEO tools and you
will have a lot of tools with different and unique features for
your needs.
Links are very important but if you are smart you will not need
as many to beat out the competition. Build your inbound links
slow and steady, and from a variety of sources. Make sure to use
your keyword phases in your anchor text and vary the text for
some of the links. This will appear natural to the search
engines and should help you to avoid over optimization or spam
penalties. If you are trying to acquire one hundred inbound
links to your web site, space your acquisitions out over a three
month period or longer. One hundred backlinks appearing all at
once looks very unnatural especially if you do not keep building
backlinks at that rate. Make sure you have well written relevant
content. When optimizing your web site stay with in all search
engine guidelines. The guidelines will give you a good idea of
what and what not to do for you web site to rank well in the
search engines. You do not want all your hard work to go to
waste because of an over aggressive tactic or simple mistake
that is outside of the search engine guidelines.
About the author:
John Tourloukis is the founder of Fast PC Networks an internet
consulting and SEO
firm
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