One of the essential things you can do to enhance your search engine marketing is to study your competitors. Analyzing the competition will open new avenues of success in the industry. The strategy is similar in the web world. The following are the ways to analyze the competition:

The structures of the URLs: This is your starting point. Look to see if you can tell a little bit about their website just from the keywords of the URL. Also note whether they are static/dynamic.

Meta Data: One should analyze the Meta Data of the competitor’s website. Emphasis should be given in finding out the meta keywords that are incorporated in the meta data of the pages. Are they visible in the title and description for the page One should also check if the meta keywords are visible in the title and description of the particular webpage.

Locating the Site Map: It is very important to have easy navigational links, which flow from one page to the other. Does the site map indicate this? By ensuring easy navigation you are allowing the search engines an easy way to crawl over the pages if they are text based links. This will in the help to boost your page rankings within the search engines.

Pay attention to the link popularity: When checking out your competitor’s site pay particular attention to the link backs. How many quality links are there? The reason this is so important is because of the way that search engines perceive links. The search engines more or less figure, if popular links are in favor of linking to the site, then it must be good. So they will boost your rankings based on the quantity and quality of those links. This will give you an insight on how to utilize links to build your traffic.

Your rank in the search engines is influenced by the age of your site. Try to determine the age of your competitors sites.

Indexed Pages. These are the pages that show up on the search engines index. Those websites that are in the top rankings are easy for the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.to put in their indexes.

Nobody should ever downplay the importance of the home page. Google actually scores this page somewhere between 0-10. Again this score will be influences by the incoming links. You can check the statistics for this page on PRChecker or through the Google tool bar. It would be a wise move to do so when it comes to analyzing your competitors.

Strongest Pages – A few online SEO tools like SEOmoz provides “strongest pages” tool which will show the important pages on the domain. It depends upon the number of links pointing to the website and the current rankings. This gives you an idea of what content on their domain is causing the high rankings. It will provide you a brief idea about what content on the domain is pushing them to get higher ranks.

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