In order to execute a successful SEO strategy, it is very important to know who your competitors are. Understanding your competitors’ SEO strategy, website and their level of penetration in the internet is critical to the success of SEO campaigns. What I am referring to is not just direct competitors, but competitors that rank in search engines for the keywords that you optimize your website.

Executing an SEO competitive analysis

Competitive SEO analysis can reveal many interesting findings about your competitors’ SEO. After you have shortlisted the keywords and the competitors that rank for those keywords, run your competitors’ websites through this checklist:

Content Analysis:

Analyzing your competitors’ content will help you set a benchmark on how much you need to optimize your website.

Title and Description Tags: Compare your title and description tags with your competitors’ to assess the number of times the keyword appears, placement of keyword and identify if you can make your tags look more appealing than your competitors can.

Heading Tags: Compare your competitors’ websites to identify if your targeted keywords are used. Analyze the overall density of the keyword present in heading tags. Normally, a top-ranking website will always have the targeted keyword present in the H1, H2 … H6 tags.

Body Text: Analyze the overall keyword density, placement of your targeted term in your competitors’ website to assess how well the content is optimized. Identify if the content is contextually relevant to the keyword being targeted on the page.

Alternate Text: Analyze if the images used on your competitors’ website contain the targeted term.

Domain Names and URLs: Most of the websites that contain keywords in their domains would already have scored a brownie point; they would be ranking for those competitive keywords. If the keyword you are targeting is not present in your domain name, ensure that it is at least present in your URLs.

Strong and Bold Tags: Most of the competing websites would enclose important keywords within strong or bold tags. This highlights the important terms to search engines.

Bulleted Lists: Analyze if your competitors have the targeted keyword present in their bulleted list.

Website Architecture

Your website may have been optimized perfectly for targeted keywords, but if you are still not ranking for your targeted keywords in SERPs. Then it may be because you have bad website architecture

URL Structure: Ensure your websites URL structure is free of any dynamic strings and parameters. This may help you score high rankings in search engines.

Domain Age: If your competitors’ domain age is older than yours is, ensure that you register your domain for at least 10 years. This will help search engines consider that you seriously want to establish your presence on the internet.

No-follow Tags: Check if your competitors have used no-follow tags to channel page rank juice throughout the website. Implementing a thematic website structure can do wonders for your website rankings.

XML and HTML Sitemaps: Competitor websites that perform well in SERPs always have a HTML sitemap as their internal navigation. Ensure that you create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines; this will ensure that all the inner pages are crawled, too.

Internal Navigation: This is one of the most important factors that decide how well your website performs in SERPs against your competitors. Ensure that your innermost pages are accessible within the first three clicks when a user lands on a page. Your internal navigation could be in the form of top global navigation, footer links, breadcrumbs, category based navigation, news tags, cloud tags, etc.

Flash, Ajax, Frames, JavaScript’s: Your competitors may take your place in SERPs if your content is not visible to search engines. Ensure that critical content that you expect to be crawled is parsed by search engines. Do not make your content as a part of Flash, Ajax, Frames or JavaScript’s. If you do, ensure that you present an alternate version of the same content in textual format to search engines.

Internal Linking and External Linking

Internal Linking: Assess your competitors’ internal linking for the keyword you want to optimize and you will notice in most cases that the keyword is present in the internal links of the competitors’ site. Assess how many such anchor texts are pointing to the ranking URL and the page rank of the pages that have the anchor text for that keyword in your competitors’ site. This will help you understand how many internal anchor texts you need for your website.

External Linking: Most of the external links present in your website must be relevant to the content that is being optimized. Most of your top-ranking competitors would have implemented a no-follow tag on most of their external links. Ensure that external links present on your website has a no-follow tag. This will ensure that you prevent the flow of valuable page rank juice to external sites.

Backlinks: Analyze your competitors’ backlinks for relevance and anchor text. Identify the number of websites that contain the targeted keyword as anchor text and measure the page rank of those linking pages. This will help you understand how much time you need to spend in your back linking efforts.

Once the analysis is complete, ensure that you use this data to compare your website against your competitors’. This tell you how much you need to optimize your website to win your way through SERPs.

Contributed by Zuheb SM

How on-page Search Engine Optimization can boost your organic search results

In Part 1 of the blog, we discussed a few important on-page SEO factors that are essential to get high rankings in the Search Engine ranking pages.

This part will cover the rest of the top-nine Search Engine ranking factors. These factors include:

1. Header Tags:

Header tags such as H1, H2 … H6 define the headings in HTML documents or pages. The main heading on the page is defined using H1 tags , followed by H2, H3… H6.

These header tags help search engines identify the important keywords of the particular web page.

Given below is an example of a heading tag.

E.g.: <h1> Search Marketing & Social Media Marketing Solutions</h1>

2. File naming:

It is good practice to use your important keywords in the file names of images, documents, sound and video clips, etc. Ensure that you describe your files well by choosing keywords that describe the image or the file.

File naming helps images or documents to be searched across Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo!

E.g.

1. search-social-media-marketing.jpg

2. social-media-marketing-whitepaper.pdf

3. Alt tags for images:

Search Engine spiders are unable to read the content present within an image. We recommended that you include an alternate text in the HTML code of the image. The alternate text should describe the image and should also contain keywords being optimized for the page.

E.g.: <img src=”/images/ social-media-marketing.jpg” alt= Social Media Marketing Company” />

4. Use Anchor texts:

An anchor text is text that links a term to a particular webpage. Ensure that your anchor text contains keywords. Anchor text that points to a destination page is considered as a vote given by the page where the link appears. Anchor texts are generally of two types,

1. External links – links pointing from sites other than yours

2. Internal links – links present within your website

E.g. If your home page is about “Social Media Marketing”, then it is recommended you use keywords in your anchor text links as “social media marketing” and then point it to the homepage.

<a href=”www.position2.com”>social media marketing </a>

5. Variations of tags:

It is good to place important keywords inside tags such as:

a. <b>bold</b>  tag

b. <strong> Strong </strong> tag

c. <i> Italics </i> tag

d. <em> Emphasis </em> tag

These tags helps Search Engines identify an important word present in the content of the page.

E.g. <p>Position2 has emerged as a pioneer in the field of Search and <b>Social Media Marketing</b></p>

6. Links to external pages:

External website links help in bringing quality visitors and will have a positive impact on search engine rankings. Ensure your site links to related domains or categories.

7. HTML/XHTML/CSS validation of a webpage as per W3C standards:

Validation is the process of checking your document against the authoritative body, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which governs the standard of coding for websites. W3C standards are the benchmark for web development and are developed for cross-browser compliance and general usability. By having your website validated on W3C, you can minimize errors present in your website’s coding and ensure that your website loads correctly across all browsers.

8. Adding a sitemap:

Sitemaps are an essential element of website optimization. Sitemaps help users and Search Engines to find the pages present in your site. There are two types of sitemaps, HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps. An HTML sitemap should help users navigate within the website, while an XML sitemap is meant for search engines.

9. Adding Robots.txt:

A robots.txt is a file that is placed on your server to avoid Search Engine spiders from crawling or indexing confidential pages of your site. It is also used to disallow broken links and pages that are unimportant to visitors who come to your website.

The file is a text file, which can be created in Notepad. It should be saved to the root directory of your site.

E.g. www.position2.com/robots.txt

The robots file should contain:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /paid-downloads

Disallow: /admin-login

In the next part, we will talk about elements of on-page Search Engine optimization that should be avoided.

Contributed by Asha Krishnan