Analyzing your competition should be the second step taken
during the SEO process (right after and sometimes even during
keyword selection). Looking at what and how your competition
have positioned their website where you want yours to be placed
will lend great insight into how to get yours there.

The
above statement should not be taken as meaning that early in the
campaign is the only time that competition analysis is
important. Once you are holding a top position your competition
will undoubtedly renew their efforts to take back what you have
replaced. Competition analysis is a step that must be taken to
find out what you need to do to take a top position but which
also should be performed periodically to detect your
competitor's efforts to take back "their" former positions.

In this article we will cover onsite factors which must be
considered and in part two we will cover external factor
analysis including incoming links, anchor text, PageRank,
etc.

Onsite Factors

Onsite
factors of your website are the easiest to address as they are
factors which are under your complete control. You have the
power to change anything within your site from the content,
internal linking structure, and even the design structure
itself.

Key onsite factors that must be considered in
competition analysis are:

• Titles and meta tags


• Keyword density and content
• Special formats and
  positioning

There are many tools that are
available to help you determine what the optimal levels are.
Generally these are knows as KDA (Keyword Density Analysis)
tools. Of all of them there is one that we use at Beanstalk that
we have found provides better, more accurate information than
the others and that is >Total Optimizer Pro by TopNet Solutions. The reason we
chose this one above the others is twofold. First, it provides
very easy to read and thorough information that can be analyzed
quickly and second, they have built in tools to analyze offsite
factors to a level that don't exist in other software.
Essentially this means for you that a single tool can basically
give you the recipe you will need to take and hold your position
in the top ten.

Title And Meta Tags

While meta tags definitely don't hold the weight they once
did they are certainly worth adding to your site given that they
take seconds to add. Titles on the other hand hold significant
weight and must be created carefully to insure that they hold
maximum SEO effectiveness and also that they appeal to the
searchers.

In analyzing the titles and meta tags
essentially you are looking for the optimal keyword density of
those tags. A KDA tool will let you know what percentage of your
competitions tags are made up of the targeted keywords. A good
KDA tool will also display the range or average of percentages.
Due to their low weight, meta tags don't have to be given quite
the attention that titles do. When you are optimizing your
titles you will want to insure that you fall somewhere near the
middle of the pack. Hopefully in your industry, the top ten
sites have relatively close percentages in which case it is easy
to determine what the optimal percentage is, however assuming
that they don't, you will want to gear your title tag to
something that falls in the upper end of the range (though not
over) of densities and also keep that title interesting to the
searcher who will see it as the link to your site in the search
results.

Google at least and probably the other major
engines as well have or will be adding into the ranking
algorithm a function that records the number of times a specific
link is clicked when it appears in the results. If your site
appears in the top of the results but is not click at a rate
that is acceptable for that position your website will slip.
Like any other marketing tool, your title tag is the gateway
from the search engine results to your website: insure you've
created an attractive welcome mat.

Keyword
Density And Content

There has been much
discussion over the years as to whether there even is an optimal
keyword density or whether density even matters. While there are
intelligent SEO's out there who would disagree, the entire
debate seems obvious to us at least. If the search engines are
looking at onsite factors at all (which they are) and looking
for relevancy then it naturally follows that there is a
percentage of your content that can consist of the targeted
keywords and indicate to the engines that your site is relevant
for a given phrase.

That said, and like the titles, it is
not about cramming in keywords anywhere to boost the density in
your content. Using a KDA tool to find the optimal density for
your industry will give you a good idea of any content changes
you may need to make. From here you will want to look at two
additional areas of your competitors sites. One which you can
get from an advances KDA tool such as Total Optimizer Pro and
the other you can get right from the engines themselves. Which
brings us to ...

Special Formats And
Positioning

Special formats will be considered
content elements such as bold, colors, anchor text, or any other
content characteristics that sets specific text out as different
when a search engine is spidering your site. Positioning refers
to the position of the keywords in relation to the entire
content on a given page. Aside from this type of positioning
there is also the consideration of how the content and keywords
are positioned relative to the code of the page (and sometimes
these can be two very different things). This topic was touched
on in a past article on table structures and will
be covered in a future mini-series on W3C complaint and search
engine friendly design, to be published in September.

Special formats such as bold, colors, italics, highlights,
etc. set specific content aside as more important than the rest.
The use of these formats, provided that it is done correctly,
can not only help improve that rankings of your website for
specific phrases but can also enhance the usability of your
website in general by drawing the human eye to key content. This
is not to say that you should bold, highlight and color every
instance of your targeted phrase but rather use these elements
to draw the eye to the key content you are most interested in
getting read.

With positioning the job is a bit more
difficult to assess. One of the best ways to quickly isolate how
your competitors have used special formats and where they have
positioned there keywords in relation to the entire page is to
simply run a search for the phrases on Google and view the cache
of the page. The keywords will be highlighted in a variety of
colors and will allow you to quickly glance through their page
and isolate what special elements they are using and where they
have positioned their keywords on the page. You will want to do
this for the top 10 competitors.

Conclusion

As with any competition,
if you understand what those who have what you want are doing it
becomes a matter of doing the same and then adding 10% to your
efforts. In the case of onsite optimization you'll simply want
to duplicate the best of the top ten, in part two on external
factors you will be doing the 10% more.