Choosing the best keywords

SEO and analyzing your competition for keywords

Knowing what your competition is doing is as important to SEO as it is to traditional forms of marketing.  For one thing, you want to attract visitors away from their site to yours, and for another how you represent yourself is likely to change along with the trends of the times.  You can keep up with what your competition is doing, in SEO, by watching market trends and using various tools that monitor not only your SERPS, but those of your competitors.

Start by knowing who you are competing with.  Perform searches that relate to the contents of your site, and make notes of which companies have the highest PageRank, and which ones hold the highest positions in search results.  Note that these two items are not necessarily the same thing.  It’s entirely possible for a site with a high PageRank to show up on the second or third search result page.  For your needs, this can be extremely important to know.

Once you’ve identified who your top competitors are, the real work begins.  If your competitors have a high PageRank, but are not on the top of the search results, you’ll want to know why not, and make the changes to your own site to take this into consideration.  Copy the content of their page, and run it through a text analyzer, find out how often they’ve used their keywords, and exactly what the most often used keywords they used are.  Compare this information to your own keywords, and then compare it to the same analysis of the top search results.  Make lists, look for similarities, and then use what you determine to improve how your own site will be rated and ranked.  You may think you’ve chosen the best keywords in the world for your site, but they are useless if those words are overused by your competitors, or are never used by human searches.  The key to success is to know what your competitors are doing, and then doing it better.  Use Alexa, Google, and DMOZ to get an idea of what works, and then look to see if your competitors have done their homework. With that information in hand, you will be better suited to beat them at the game of SEO.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com