Thursday, August 20, 2009

Competitive Analysis

Before beginning your SEO efforts, you should do a thorough competitive analysis. Analyzing your competition should be at the very top of your to-do list, along with tagging for your web site and keyword analysis. Essentially, as a small business or entrepreneur you should probably do a competitive analysis even before you begin tagging your site.

Analyzing your sites conversions, web statistics, and other elements as well as your competitors is an ongoing process. Similar to your web site, your competitors will also change over time. They may learn how to reach a certain search engine better or even approach their customers faster enough to stay ahead of you. Whatever the case may be, you should always take the time to analyze what they are doing.

When going through the analysis method, it is very important to keep in mind that you should not only look out for your direct competitors but also ones who are indirect. It is best to look at those competitors who are ahead of you in search engine rankings, even if they’re offerings are unlike yours.

A competitive analysis should cover the following:

Page titles: Is the sites page titles consistent? What keywords do they use, if any at all? How competition uses page titles should give you an indication of what you’re doing right or wrong with your own site.
Page saturation: Are their pages indexed? Look to see what you should include or exclude on your site pages.
Site rankings: Where in the SERPs is the competitor’s site ranked? Make note of the top three to five sites.
Meta data: Look at what meta data your competitors are including. How is it worded? You can access the source code of a site by selecting Source from the View menu on your web browser.

About CODANK Web Design

CODANK is a top rated Web Design and Internet Marketing firm located in Charlotte, NC. We are dedicated to providing the highest quality, cost effective custom software development services, delivering a broad range of business consulting and outsourcing services. For more information, visit us at www.codank.com

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