To first of all, take and keep your coffee, he..he.. just relaxs….remember that competition is good for any business. It’s what keeps you growing, and also keeps you innovative. It stops your business from becoming stale. You have to strive to be one step ahead of your competition, and the best way to do that is to know what he/she is all about. To do this you must analyze your competitor and if you do this well, then you will only serve to enhance your search engine marketing. Here is an analytical format that you may find useful. Don’t think that you are doing something deceitful or unfair. It’s not like you are stealing secrets. You are learning from someone else’s success. There are no secrets to educating oneself in any field or industry. In addition, you are not doing anything that your competitor won’t do, and probably is doing. This knowledge is helping them to keep ahead of the competition.

First of all, remember that competition is good for any business. It’s what keeps you growing, and also keeps you innovative. It stops your business from becoming stale. You have to strive to be one step ahead of your competition, and the best way to do that is to know what he/she is all about. To do this you must analyze your competitor and if you do this well, then you will only serve to enhance your search engine marketing. Here is an analytical format that you may find useful. Don’t think that you are doing something deceitful or unfair. It’s not like you are stealing secrets. You are learning from someone else’s success. There are no secrets to educating oneself in any field or industry. In addition, you are not doing anything that your competitor won’t do, and probably is doing. This knowledge is helping them to keep ahead of the competition.

Determine if the URL’s are static/dynamic. How do they look to you? Can you tell what the competitor’s web site is about just by reading the URL’s ? Are they straight to the point and are they search engine friendly?

Pay attention to the Meta data keywords. Look to see if these keywords are blended within the Meta data of the pages. Do you see these same keywords in the title and description of the home page?

Locating the Site Map: It is very important to have easy navigational links, which flow from one page to the other. Does the site map indicate this? By ensuring easy navigation you are allowing the search engines an easy way to crawl over the pages if they are text based links. This will in the help to boost your page rankings within the search engines.

The link backs are very important, as they should be on your site as well. There must be a good quantity of them. Quantity is not enough though, they must also be high quality links as well. The major search engines base decisions on these links. For example if they are good quality, and there are lots linking to the site, then the search engines figures the site must be good, and they will view it the same way. So when it comes time to ranking they will base their scores on these findings.

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

Pages indexed – It refers to the number of webpages that are listed in the search engines index. The top ranking websites can be indexed easily by the popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Nobody should ever downplay the importance of the home page. Google actually scores this page somewhere between 0-10. Again this score will be influences by the incoming links. You can check the statistics for this page on PRChecker or through the Google tool bar. It would be a wise move to do so when it comes to analyzing your competitors.

Observing the strongest pages: You can use a search engine optimization tool, like SEOmoz to find out what are considered the strongest pages on a website. Strongest meaning the most important. This is dependant on the amount of links pointing to that particular site in combination with page rankings. If you obtain this information it will tell you what specific content is working for them. If you really take the time to analyze all of the information you have gathered ,through this competitors analysis, you will really know what is giving your competitor the lead. The next step is to incorporate all of the positive aspects into your very own site.

thaxs for reading

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