SEO & Competition Analysis - Part Two

Once you
have optimized the onsite factors from part one of this series
it's time to launch into the external factors. External SEO
factors generally refer to the internal links to your, and your
competitor's, website.

Analyzing the links to your
competitors is not a simple matter of running a
link:www.competitorsdomain.com on Google and rushing off and
duplicating what you find there. First of all, Google does not
display all of the links they find to a site and thus, this
count will leave you with about 5 or 6 percent of the real links
to your main competitors. Yahoo! is much better at displaying
all the links to a site however even this has it's shortcomings
in the analysis process. Secondly, the number of links is only a
fraction of what's important in their development.

To
fully grasp how your competitors are ranking highly for your
targeted phrases you will want to know a number of things about
the links to their site including:

• How many links
  do they have?
• How many of these links come from the
  same sites?
• Are these sites relevant?
• What is
  the PageRank distribution of the links?
• Are these links
  image or text links and if text,
• What anchor text is
  used to link to your competitor's site?

Why Are These Factors Important?

These factors are important as they define the value of the
link. The number of links is perhaps the least important of
these factors. A site can have 10,000 incoming links and if they
are all from a single unrelated site with a low PageRank then
the value of these links is negligible.

Knowing how many
of the links to your competitor's site come from the same site
or sites will let you know where they have bought advertising
and also help isolate weakness in their link counts. Multiple
links from the same website are not given the same value as
multiple links from different websites. If your competitors have
thousands of incoming links that come from 5 different websites
you have far less work to do that if they even had a couple
hundred, all from different sites.

The relevancy of the
incoming links is extremely important and gaining importance
every update. Unfortunately this is also the hardest factor to
gauge as, "what constitutes relevancy?" and, "how exactly do I
find out if my competitors links are relevant without visiting
every one of their links?" can be problematic questions.

Gauging relevancy can generally be done with a simple
thought: if I am on a site and the link makes sense to be there
(for example, a web design company linking to a web hosting
company) then it can be considered relevant. Basically, if there
are people who will actually click the link then it is relevant.
Finding out if your competitor's links are relevant without
visiting every one of their link partners is a different hurdle
to jump.

Rather than visiting each-and-every link it is
easier view only the most important ones; that would be the ones
from high PageRank pages. But how does one do that?

As
with the use of a KDA tool in part one, we use the external
analysis features of >Total Optimizer Pro to tear apart the external factors our
main competitors are using to hold top ten positions. While in
part one I was able to note that there are other tools out there
that break down keyword density elements, I am not able to do
the same with offsite optimization factors. Total Optimizer Pro
is the only tool we use that allows for such detailed analysis
of external SEO factors when dealing with competition
analysis.

The first step is to isolate which domains the
links are coming from. The more links coming from a few domains
the better as this indicates that the competition is lower than
a pure link-count would indicate. Moving on from there we look
to the PageRank breakdown of the links. The higher the numbers
of high PageRank links the more difficult the competition is
however, once you have isolated which domains the links are
coming from it is often simply a matter of visiting the site and
establishing the same links to yours either through exchanges,
directory listings, or other tactics.

While you are on
the sites, assess whether the content is relevant. You will
undoubtedly not want to visit each and every page that links to
your competitors however if you visit all the top sites (i.e.
PageRank 3 or higher) you will get a very solid idea of the
relevancy value of the links. Once we know the value in regards
to relevancy of the content we now need to know what they're
doing in regards to transferring that relevancy along in the
form of their links.

Using a tool such as Total Optimizer
Pro it is simple to determine exactly what types of links are
pointing to your competitors, however it is possible, though
much more time-consuming, to do it manually (i.e. you will have
to visit every page).

An important factor in SEO and the
building of relevancy to your site comes in the form of anchor
text. The verbiage used to link to your site, or the alt text in
the event the link is an image link, can play an important role.
To illustrate this with a great example; searches on Google for
"msn" results in the page www.submit-it.com in position seven.
If you view the cache, rather than receiving the highlighted use
of the term "msn" (as noted in Part One of this series) you
receive the note that, " These terms only appear in links
pointing to this page: msn". The relevancy of
the anchor txt in this case is so strong that this page outranks
many with "msn" optimized for using onsite factors.

What Do We Know?

So what do we now
know about our competition? We now know where their links are
coming from, the PageRank of those links, the relevancy of the
top links, the anchor text and/or alt tags used to link to your
competitors' sites, and how many of those are multiple links
from the same site. Basically, combined with the information
that was attained in part one of this series in regards to the
onsite factors we effectively have a blueprint for what is
required to hold a top positions for a specific phrase.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So now you
have a blueprint, but what do you do with it? The onsite factors
covered in part one need to be duplicated. The offsite factors
(i.e. incoming links) need to be duplicated however what you
also must keep in mind is that you are working to beat someone
out. They in turn will work to take back their position, and
there may be others working to do that same that just haven't
shown up yet.

Here we follow the 10%-more rule. In
regards to onsite factors, all you can do is work with the
average keyword densities and make sure your content is well
written while maximizing the usage of keyword density and
special text to give you the biggest boost possible. After that
the 10% rule comes into effect. Once you know exactly what your
main competitors have done in regards to their incoming links,
do that but add 10% either in numbers or in value and
relevancy.

While this entire process can be very time
consuming, the goal here is not to save time, it is to maximize
the effectiveness of the SEO performed on your site. Spending a
fraction of the time to produce little or no results is never as
desirable as insuring you're doing it right from the beginning
and then taking the time to do what's needed, thus increasing
your odds of success greatly.