Analyzing your competition's website marketing strategy

It is a never-ending battle to keep your site in a top
position with the search engines. No one said it would be easy. But if done right, the fruits of your labor can be plentiful.

Search engines constantly change their ranking formulas, striving to produce more accurate results for their visitors. These variables require constant analysis of your competition and top ranking sites to figure out which new factors the engine's are calculating into their algorithms - and the weight value they place on each one.

By going into a particular search engine and conducting a search query for your best keywords--you can analyze your competition. By doing this you can gain insight as to what makes the top ranking sites - top ranking sites.

This research is crucial to optimizing your website. By analyzing your competition you can discover which optimization techniques you should concentrate on within your own site design. Examining sites that achieve a top 10 rank position can give you valuable insight as to *which* factors *each* search engine places value on.

You not only need to look at a site's visible features, but you also need to go behind the scene and examine the HTML coding on each page. You can do this by clicking on your browser's View button - then "source" or "page source" option. Look at the coding and analyze the following:

* First, look at the URL name to see if has keywords in it.
* Then check the TITLE, META tags, ALT tags and Text Links to
see which keywords they contain.
* Check the *number* of links to relevant information
* Look at the content and check Keyword Density, Keyword
Placement and Keyword Proximity.
* See how many characters are used in each element.
* See which keywords are used frequently.
* Find out the number of external links your competition has by
running a link popularity check at http://linkpopularity.com

Then, identify your weak areas and focus your attention on
*those* areas.

We don't suggest copying your competitor's HTML coding, but we do suggest copying their techniques.

Contributions @ Dream City Design