Now you have your keywords selected, time to find out what your competition is doing for each of your keywords, also you want to analyze the first page of Google for all of your keywords.  I usually start by opening up a spreadsheet program.  Now you will be doing this for your individual site, whereas I find myself often doing this a few times a week for potential clients so I have a template already worked out to make my job easier and it keeps all the information neat and tidy in one place so I can always come back and refer to it throughout the clients campaign.  Most of the keyword analysis of your keywords would take place during the selection process which we went through in The SEO Basics (Part 1) – Keyword Selection.

As far as the search volume and advertisers competition we have already figured that out, but I also like to look at the first page of Google for the number of competing websites and the range of page ranks that are currently on the first page.

How does this help?  Well, when you are looking at your best keywords you want to find out the amount of work needed to get the best possible results.  Looking at the example above it shows me the number of websites competing for the same keywords as I am, I generally take that number find out about 20% of the actual sites are pining for the keyword, the rest simply have something to do with the keyword that was being search for by the surfer.

The example above shows the keyword “carribean vacations” and the total number of sites.  So in my estimate you would be competing with approximately 1.7 million sites (which actually sounds about right).  Travel related keywords with such general terms will have a high number of competing sites, everybody wants to be the next expedia or travelocity, but I digress.

This is a highly competitive keyword but not an impossible feat as you are constantly seeing new websites appearing on the first page of Google.  Knowing this information now you will know it will take some great work in order to see the first page results we are looking for.

Next I look at the actual websites, this will be analyzing my competition.  We want to look at a few things when you are looking at your competition:

1. Page Rank
2. Back links
3. Content Density
4. Page Titles

Page Rank

Google describes PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Essentially Page Rank is a number between 1 – 10 that Google represents for each website.  Why I look at this is a matter of what my competition is ranking on the first page so I know what I will need to accomplish in my link development campaign to achieve the highest rank for my clients.

Back Links

Google obviously only shows the most relevant back links for each site, you will never get an accurate number of links that your competition has coming into their site unless you think outside of the box.  I have two that  I use when researching backlinks for my competition.  One is simply using Yahoo!.  Yahoo! actually shows an accurate number of back links to your competition site as well as yours, this will be useful to see where your backlinks are coming from as well.  Another program I use is one that I purchased.  This allows me to keep a closer eye on all the competition on more of a frequent basis.

Content Density

For this I simply Google the keyword that I am researching for my competition and then go to their site and load it.  Once it is loaded I simply use the highlight tool that Google has on their toolbar and I look at each page that I see that particular keyword shows up.  This is not an exact science of course, but you want to use a general thumb of somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the content contains your keywords.

Page Titles

Last but certainly not least, I look at my competitions titles on Google.  I want to see the formula that they are using to create their titles.  Generally when I am perusing the first page of Google I will see the keyword in all of the first page websites.  Title tags are of the upmost of importance when it comes to Google and any search engine for that matter.  Some will lead with the keyword, some will lead with their Name and some just stuff the title with a number of keywords.  Again, the science is not there, but I can generally tell which have been there for a number of years and have a solid SEO campaign that they have been working on, and others who have not got the key to the titles and are new.

In conclusion, you must know where and what your competition is doing in order to move forward with your campaign.  If you have an SEO expert helping you or you are tackling this on your own, the more you know, the better off you will be!

I hope this information helps you!

Our Next Installment:  Optimizing your Website

Till then!

One of the most valuable parts of any search engine optimization is choosing the actual keywords that will make your campaign the most successful. In this tutorial I will be using a travel site as my reference. I will give several different examples of how to choose the right keywords with the best results.

Example One:

http://www.travelsite.com

Travel firm that specializes in vacation packages in the Caribbean.

1. Go to any of your reliable keyword selector programs. There are two that we use:

• Word Tracker ( for this I will use the free version)
• Google Ad words Selector

2. Pick a general keyword in order to find your niche keyword, I chose “caribbean vacations” for this example.

and

3. Next, they will both pull up a list of keywords related to the general keyword I just put in to the database.

In Wordtracker they will only give you the keyword results for 100 related keywords in the free service and they will also tell you the number of times that the keyword is searched for on a daily basis.

In Google Adwords Selector they give you a bit more information they give you the the current month’s average search volume, much more then 100 keyword results. When I’m looking at this I pay attention to one specific area and that is the advertiser competition, the reason being, the more advertiser’s are spending the higher the search volume.

4. The next step is I take the top 5 keywords with the highest search volume & most searched in word tracker, most times they will be many more than 5 relevant keywords but I will concentrate on the best keywords in the beginning stages of SEO and gradually over time incorporate more and more keywords in order to saturate the search engines.

In my mock up example I will choose:

• caribbean vacations
• cheap caribbean vacations
• all inclusive caribbean vacations
• caribbean vacation
• caribbean vacation packages

5. There you have it, the best keyword selection. I picked these 5 keywords because they have:

a. The highest search volume
b. The highest advertiser competition

When you are choosing your keywords there are a number of variables that you have to think about when you are looking for your top searched results. The example above was an easy selection of keywords but it is an easy market for travel. If you are offering a new type of service or something that no one has ever seen before you have to think outside the box and try to figure out the best direction to get get your traffic through your keyword selection. I always advise clients who have this issue to take it to the streets, ask your friends, family, neighbor what search term they would type in if they are looking for your product and start from there!

Much luck in your keyword selection, come back soon for our next installment of SEO Basics where we explore Keyword Analysis & Competition Analysis.