Researching the Competition in SEO

Researching the top-performing web-sites for final choice of your keyword phrase is definitely the most significant step in keyword choice and it takes slightly operate. The superior news is the fact that Firefox features a wide variety of plugins you could use to produce your final evaluation lots a lot easier.

Plugins like Search engine marketing Quake deliver substantially of your on-page evaluation easily, as opposed to undertaking all your investigation manually-thank goodness!  Just after you’ve narrowed down your keyword list to just a handful of terms, the following step is researching the competition. I'll now show you ways to investigation the competition applying a real-world example so you could do it for the personal web-site. Preserve in thoughts, there is certainly computer software out there which can automate this approach for you personally (I’ve included a link on http://www myseomadesimple.com/secret.htm).

Nonetheless, you'll want to study ways to investigation your competition on your personal to improved have an understanding of this approach of picking out keyword phrases. Undertaking so is analogous to mastering division longhand ahead of you get started applying a calculator! Selecting up on our earlier example, assume you’ve chosen a principal keyword phrase and have decided to start researching the competitors (ex: women’s tennis shoes).

1. Take a look at Google and enter the initial keyword phrase you happen to be researching. Enter the keyword phrase “women’s tennis shoes” and pick Google Search.
2. Determine the all-natural search outcomes versus the paid search outcomes. The all-natural outcomes will seem beneath any paid outcomes.
3. Write down the URLs of your initially set of all-natural search outcomes. The URLs will seem in green beneath every single description.

In this example, the initial 5 all-natural outcomes are:
• www.tennis-warehouse.com/catthumbs html?CREF=150
• www.tennis-warehouse.com
• www.tennisexpress.com
• www.golfsmith.com/ts/browse.php?N=1548257
• www.zappos.com/n/es/d/35157.html 

Now you are able to start your site-by-site evaluation.

You will really need to do the following for every single web page to identify for those who can outrank them. I can show you ways to do the initial one- then basically repeat the exact same methods for web pages two, 3, 4, and 5. For every single web page, start by recording the following:

•  Web-site URL
• Google PR
• Quantity of web pages linking in
• Keyword in <h1> tag
•  Keyword in initially twenty-five words of page
•  Keyword in final twenty-five words of page
•  Keyword bolded, italicized, and underlined

Let’s do this for the initial web page:
www.tennis-warehouse.com/catthumbs.html?CREF=150
Start by recording the Google Page Rank of this web page. You could see from the rank meter inside the Google Toolbar (you could download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com) that it features a Google PR of four. You basically must mouse more than your PR checker in the Google toolbar to acquire the actual page rank.

The second issue we really need to do is evaluate other on-page optimization components we’ve discussed which include meta tags, use of <h1> tags, and so on. You could see from what I’ve circled that the title in the pretty prime of your net page contains the phrase All Women’s Tennis Shoes plus the initially header on the page says, All Women’s Tennis Shoes.

I also advocate taking a look at the supply code and trying to find <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> tags. To perform so basically click on Edit within your browser menu, then pick View Supply Code and use the Obtain command. How lots of situations of header tags are you able to obtain? Upon critique, I noticed (see beneath) that the keyword phrases are inside the title but not in any <h1> or <h2> header tags. Also, I didn’t obtain the meta tags that just about every web page should really have listing a title, description, and keywords-not to mention all of the JavaScript that appears on the page-and this web page is ranked number one particular. Just after some standard investigation, it appears as even though the web page we’re researching is not all that effectively optimized.

I did obtain an instance of your keyword phrase in an <h3> tag nevertheless it was fairly far down on the page of code. Note: You do not really need to be an specialist in programming code. All you are on the lookout for is no matter if or not the web-site you are researching is applying meta tags and header tags (<h1>, <h2>, or <h3>) that include things like the distinct keyword phrase you are researching.
So what have we learned about this web page? It looks to me as even though they may be not completely on-page optimized for the keyword phrase “women’s tennis shoes” simply because they haven’t followed all the on-page optimization procedures we’ve covered inside the initially element of this book. This can be a positive sign for the reason that if we chose to create a competitive web-site, we could use meta tags and also other on-page procedures which include <h1> tags, bolded text, internal linking, right keyword placement, and also a rapid loading page, to boost Google optimization. Lastly, the Google Page Rank of four is superior, but more than time, we could match it or perhaps beat it using a PR5 rank. See what I mean when I say that simply because a web page is viewed as “competitive” it may perhaps nevertheless be worth competing against applying search engine optimization? Together with the application of right on-page and off-page Search engine marketing procedures, you may absolutely out-rank this web-site for the keyword phrase “women’s tennis shoes.” All it would take is some time and right application of your Search engine marketing created and a very simple procedures.