Competition Analysis
When looking at your online competition
your most likely starting point is to conduct a search for
the very phrase or words you want your own site to be found
for. However, all this gives you is the total matches for an
exact phrase search. A lot of those "competitors" aren't
even trying.
To eliminate the "accidental competitors" and figure out who
you're really competing with, try these instead:
First, the very least someone would
do to optimize would be to include all the words in the page
title. To find out how many there are, do an "allintitle:"
search on Google. For a 3-word search phrase, your query on
Google will look like this:
allintitle:keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
Second, you can narrow that search down to pages that
have the exact search phrase in the title, as a phrase:
allintitle:"keyword1 keyword2 keyword3"
That tells you roughly how many are trying to compete
with you. Now let's see how many are competing on "off page"
factors as well. To do this, you want to know how many
of the pages with the phrase in the title, also have the
phrase in the text of inbound links:
allintitle:"search phrase" inanchor:"search phrase"
Now, let's see how many incoming links the top ranked
sites actually have. You may need to match their counts, or
get higher quality links, in order to compete.
You can look at 'em with the Alexa toolbar installed, and it
will show you, or you can do a "link:domain" search on
Google. Don't just look at the links to the ranked page,
because interior pages will show few links. It's also a good
idea to look at their link popularity on other search
engines.
Don't forget that the competition doesn't sit still.
If you've installed the Alexa toolbar, check the traffic
rankings of the top 10 sites while you're at it. If they're
a lot busier than your site, consider the possibility that
they may have more resources available for content
development, link building, etc. You can also check Alexa
rankings at
http://www.alexaranking.com, but I have no idea
if they got permission etc.
TITLE, META Description, META Keywords
Title Tag
Use main keywords, do not include
company name unless well known, or searchable. Do not repeat
keywords or any words more than twice, and if repeating them
do not put the two occurrences together.
Make Title tag the first thing after
the <HEAD> tag.
META Description
Use to ensure page is attractive to
searcher when found. Put keywords at start of description,
use same ones as those used in the title tag is suitable.
Keep description less than 200
characters
Try to not repeat words in this tag;
however, do use various forms of words in this tag, i.e.,
plural/singular, "ed" or "ing" forms of words, and that sort
of thing. Always make sure this tag is an actual sentence,
not simply a list of keywords.
If you create a good meta description
tag, you can often use it as the description you enter in
search engine directories such as
Yahoo!,
LookSmart, and the
Open Directory.
META Keywords
May as well use it, don't overload it
with the same keywords, put the important ones first, select
others and phrases form text on the page.
Content Copy Writing
Multiple Spelling Quandary
If you *must* use several spellings,
choose one version per page. The most common spelling would
be used on your index page. The others can go on subsequent
pages. Put a short little sentence in the copy that stated
something to the effect of "Tradeshow booths (often spelled
trade show booths) must be lightweight yet sturdy..." That
way, people don't think you're nuts when they see multiple
spellings within your pages.
International Consideration
Use UK or US spelling (i.e. who's
searches do you want to track - should you optimise
for optimisation or optimize for
optimization? If only interest in UK traffic,
use UK spelling, otherwise consider that most searches will
be the US versions.
Directories to Submit to
|
.
GoGuides.Org |
Accept
Submissions: Yes |
|
Volunteer run
directory listing sites by ratings. Allows editors
to place banners on their topics. |
|
( Rating: 4.79, Votes:
163 ) |
|
.
Gimpsy |
Accept
Submissions: Yes |
|
Internet directory
that only holds carefully reviewed interactive
sites. Uses a unique classification method and
provides an easy to use Natural Language interface
to the user. |
|
( Rating: 3.53, Votes:
32 ) |
|
.
JoeAnt.com |
Accept
Submissions: Yes |
|
JoeAnt was founded by
a group of former Go Guide volunteers. The site is
organized by topics. You can submit your site by
following the most appropriate category or sign up
to become an editor. |
|
( Rating: 8.38, Votes:
58 ) |
|
.
Zeal |
Accept
Submissions: Yes |
|
Zeal is a
community-driven directory. The directory is owned
by Looksmart, as such, addition to Zeal can be seen
on LookSmart network. |
|
( Rating: 3.30, Votes:
10 ) |
|
.
Dmoz.org |
Accept
Submissions: Yes |
|
Dmoz or the open
directory project, is the largest human directory. |
|
( Rating: 5.54, Votes:
13 ) |
|
.
Looksmart |
Accept
Submissions: Yes |
|
LookSmart is the
world's largest professionally edited directory with
2.5 million URLs organized into more than 250,000
categories. LookSmart is committed to editorial
integrity and does not accept porn, hate or spam in
its directories. LookSmart provides |
|
( Rating: 3.00, Votes:
4 ) |
|
.
Yahoo! |
Accept
Submissions: Yes |
|
Yahoo! is the first
large scale directory and one of the most often used
search engines. |
|
( Rating: 5.15, Votes:
13 ) |
|
.
AOL Search |
Accept
Submissions: Yes |
|
AOL directory is
maintained by the Open Directory Project, and their
search engine is enhanced by Google. If your site is
listed in Google and DMOZ.org then your website will
be listed in AOL. |
|
( Rating: 2.00, Votes:
1 ) |
|
