There has been a huge amount of focus lately here in the office on what we actually do as part of our SEO process as we have been putting together manuals for our clients and for ourselves internally. We know we are bloody good at it - but we are finding the exact documentation of the process about as laborious as the process itself.

Anyway, this explains the more than normal amount of SEO posts in the last few weeks or so. Today’s post again covers on-site optimisation relative to your competitors. Here’s 12 steps I think are imperative in checking out your competitors.

1. Establish the top 10 sites in the search engine results for your keywords;
2. Compare the web page titles of these sites relative to your own for the quantity, density, position, number of words and number of characters.
3. And then compare the meta data (keywords and description) for the same features - quantity, density, position, number of characters and words
4. Look at the body text of your site against you main competitors. Analyse the first 50 words once again for quantity, density, position, number of words and characters. Also, look at the first and last sentence of the body texts. Look for words that are bold or underlined.
5. Look at in-site links, the URLs they go to, and the anchor text used in the links. Also look for keywords in the alt text and title text of the links. Check the number of times that the title text link tag is used over the plain link ref - we believe it should be no more than 6 times - but check what your competitors are doing.
6. Compare outbound links; the content of the link and where they are going.
7. Compare the physical URLs you are competing with
8. Compare the heading tags throughout the sites using the same categories of density, position, number of words and characters
9. Look at all the alt text on the images on each site
10. Count the number of words on each page (in an earlier post I discussed that top ranked sites seem to have been 500 and 700 words)
11. Establish the theme of yours and your competitors websites, that is, consider all your web page titles together to see which keywords make up the majority of your text
12. And, finally look at the general page properties. These are the HTML size, look for same colour text and background, tiny text, immediate keyword repeats, whether the sites use controls or frames, and the use of internal and external javascript. Here you are looking more that your site is doing the right things.

We have said it many times, no one really knows the construct of search engine algorithms in terms of the weighting given to links, heading tags etc. One of the axioms of on-site optimisation relative to your competitors is that if you at least equal your competitors (for search engine rankings) in terms of all the above then you are at least competing on an even playing field in terms of onsite optimisation.

Tags: SEO, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 9:17 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.