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

• Website Architecture & SEO: The dark side of the moon (2)
• Picking a search-friendly domain name (3)
• Tips for SEO-friendly website architecture – Part 1 (6)

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

• SEO Best Practices – Part 1 (2)
• Social Consumers In 2012, Paid Search Tips and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• Anchor Text and its Search Engine Optimization Importance (1)

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

Introduction

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does not consist of a fixed process which when followed will result in the website ranking high in various search engines. This is because search engines are very versatile and do not share the actual recipe they follow while calculating website ranks for particular keywords. However, there are parameters that SEO specialists utilize while optimizing websites. A few “secret ingredients” as the search engines call it are unknown as their parameters keep changing. We created this best practice document based on our experience over the years.

SEO as a whole consists of on-page and off-page activities that, if blended in the right proportion, will lead to a search engine-friendly website. This results in substantial increase in visitors to your website.

On-page activities include SEO tasks carried out on the website that vary from basic meta tag changes to complete website restructuring which takes care of a portion of the website being optimized for search engines. Off-page activities, on the other hand, consist of tasks that increase a website’s footprint across the World Wide Web.

On-page SEO best practices

1. Domain Name Selection:

While selecting a domain name, ensure that you choose the brand and a business-related keyword.

Example – If the website is for a pet food company, the website domain could be: www.AmandaPetFoods.com

2. URL Structure:

The URLs should be as short as possible with a maximum of two sub-folders along with a keyword core to that particular landing page included in the URL.

Example –  www. AmandaPetFoods.com/nutro could be named as:

www. AmandaPetFoods.com/Nutro-cat-food

3. Meta tag Optimization:

Although a website may be search engine-friendly, it is important to attract the target audience to the website. This is the role of meta tags that include the title tags, description tags and keyword tags. Search engines display title and description tags for search results, highlighting the keyword searched for. A title or description that is not compelling will not drive traffic to the website, as opposed to an eye-catching title or description.

4. Use of Header Tags

Header tags indicate to search engines what the particular landing page contains. By enclosing titles on the page (as they typically describe the contents of the page) with a header tag you can give search engines more information about a landing page. Header tags can vary from H1 to H6, with the H1 tag being the most important.

Example – <H1> Natural & Organic Pet Food Store </H1>

5. Keyword Density:

A website that has a particular keyword present in its tags and content indicates to search engines how important the keyword is to the website. Search engines calculate the frequency of keywords in content by checking the ratio of the keywords present to the total number of words. The ideal keyword density is between 2 – 3%. Anything more than 5% is perceived as “keyword stuffing” and adversely affects search ranks.

6. Latent Semantic Indexing – (LSI):

LSI is a method used to create themes around website content by incorporating synonyms, word derivatives, scientific names, etc. from a core keyword. LSI gives search engines the ability to provide its users a more relevant list of options to choose from. For example, if a page talks about ”dogs,” the page can include words like pup, puppies, doggie, puppy, canine, etc. This alerts search engines that the content contains extensive information about the subject and the website earns a higher rank in the organic search results.

7. Silo Structuring:

The term Silo structuring refers to creating themes around the website to rank in search engines for keywords. The difference here is that the theme is created using the website architecture and not the content. The method of Silo structuring is useful for websites that highlight multiple products, where multiple pages are grouped together to form a particular theme.

For example, we can create a theme for a flower section in this way:

www.mystore.com/flowers/baskets

www.mystore.com/flowers/bouquets

www.mystore.com/flowers/vase

www.mystore.com/flowers/hamper

8. Unique content:

Search engines give their audience extensive results that can have an adverse effect if the same content shows up in multiple results from different websites. Hence, a search engine checks websites for originality of content and penalizes them if the extent of duplicate content is high. Also, search engines do not crawl duplicate content on pages within the same website.

9. New content frequency:

Apart from unique content, search engines prefer websites that frequently introduce fresh content. This helps increase the frequency of bots crawling the website and hence result in a higher ranking for the website.

These are very important on-page SEO factors that should be considered while optimizing your webpage. In the next installment, we will show you some of the other parameters that could positively affect your search rankings.

• SEO Best Practices – Part 2 (0)
• Social Consumers In 2012, Paid Search Tips and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• SEO Competitive Analysis (7)