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Understand Your Online Competition

One of the best ways to grow your search engine marketing is to take a minute to study your competitors. New paths and ideas to success will open in your industry when you analyze your competition. Below are ways to help you in analyzing the competition.

URL Structure: Look at the way your competitor constructed their URL. Is it static or dynamic? Does in use words to describe the business or services is provided? What makes their URL different from the rest?

Meta Data: One should analyze the Meta Data of the competitor’s website. Emphasis should be given in finding out the meta keywords that are incorporated in the meta data of the pages. Are they visible in the title and description for the page One should also check if the meta keywords are visible in the title and description of the particular webpage.

Site Map: Convenient internal navigation plays an important role for boosting ranks. The search engines can crawl the website easily if text based links are provided to navigate to the internal pages.

Link Popularity: To have a successful website link popularity is the key to success. Look at how many quality links link back to the sites of your competitors. The more legitimate and quality links that lead back to a site, the higher the ranking with specific keywords will be. Search engines weigh sites with link popularity better than those without, in turn, boosting ranking of course. By using this method, you can find which keywords will help you gain the most visibility.

Site Age –A website’s age is a major factor that influences its rank it in the search engines.

Pages Indexed:  This is the amount of webpage’s listed in a search engine’s index. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN can easily index top ranking websites.

Home Page PR: Google uses a tool called the Google Page Rank. With this Google assigns a score of 0-10 to asses a webpage’s value. The number of links that point to the website and its current ranking is what gives this tool its outcome. The rating can be checked using the Google toolbar or PRChecker.

Strongest Pages: SEO tools, such as SEOmoz, provide a strongest pages tool, which shows the most important pages on the domain. By using this tool you can get a better idea of which parts of your competitors domain are the ones creating all the traffic for them. In addition, in turn what you need to do to mirror those results in your favor.

Now you have all the necessary tools to see where your competitor’s traffic comes from and with that knowledge comes much power. You can now tell your web desinger this information to increase the traffic to your own website.

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