• Can’t Find Your Web Pages In The Top 20 SERPs? •
• You Can Learn A Lot From Those Top Ranking Competitors •

If your site isn’t doing well in the search engine rankings, have you taken a long hard look and analyzed the top-ranking sites for your keyword phrases? Where do you see them utilizing those keyword phrases?

Where have they placed the keyword in the Title tag? At the very beginning? Third or fourth word? At the end?

How does the keyword (and modifiers if used) get woven into the Description META tag? Is it utilized once? Does it appear at the beginning, towards the middle, or …?

Is the keyword phrase used in the URL’s file name?

Analyze The Competition, Kiddo!

It’s not at all hard to get a quick overview of the top-ten sites for whatever keywords phrase you’re looking up.Using Google, MSN and Yahoo! as an examples, you’ll notice that whatever you entered for the search term, those words will become bolded in the Title and Descriptions. Voila … you will easily see how, where, and how many times and/or variables were used. Let me tell you, that is research gold right there!

I may spend umpteen hours pouring over and analyzing the SEO on the top ranking sites that my client will be competing with,  especially so if they are in a very tough, competitive niche. For many other of my clients in narrower niches, it usually only takes me about 10 minutes to determine if I will have to “worry” about the quality level of search engine optimization on their competitors sites.

I must mention that the ranking criteria differs from search engine to search engine. Where a webpage might be #1 in Google, it might not even be in the top ten in MSN or Yahoo!. For most internet marketers, the best you can do is try to address the on-page factors as I am discussing here and do your best on each page you write. If you want to really dominate the top three search engines, then you very well might have to write three unique pages of optimized content for each keyword phrase you wish to rank highly for.

I’ve said it before here, and you’ll keep reading it throughout my blog… 90% of the sites out there are NOT optimized. So for those of us doing the best we can to apply solid SEO techniques to each and every page or blog post we have created, we will be miles ahead of our competition in most instances.

These Statistics Might Make Your Knees Weak

In a very interesting 8/2006 article found on guardian.co.uk, it states “…the top result on any search engine gets 42.1% of the clickthroughs; the second, 11.2%. That’s more than half of all clickthroughs in just two results. It’s rapidly downhill from there, apart from the 10th result (before you click onto the next page)…” Please take a minute to read the article. Though there is much talk in this article about Wikipedia and I realize the results came from analyzing AOL users, the point I am making is that it DOES matter where you rank.

I don’t care if they tested senior citizens using MSN, or 22 years olds only using Yahoo! I’ll bet you the results would be very much the same. The gist of what I’m trying to get across to you is this: if you can’t be found in the top-10 results of any search engine, but more so Google, it is time to go back to the SEO drawing board. It is time to start tweaking.

Take good long hard looks at the sites that hold the top-ten positions for whatever keyword phrase you’d like to rank highly for.  What can you learn?

Take a FREE spin and research the search terms people are really typing into the search engines: Wordtracker Free Research Tool

• You’ve Paid Good Money For A Custom Designed Website Template …
And There Are NO SEO Tags In The Template’s Coding! •

OK, I had to stop what I was doing this morning (working on a mini-site for a new client) and write this post. I am astounded gang! Really … astounded. Why? I’ll tell you …

While doing research on the competition to my client’s niche, I was of course clicking on the competitors sites. Often, if I see a design I like, I’ll click on the designers link too, just to check them out. In addition, I am paying close attention to the search engine optimization of the competitors sites.

What made me stop to write this post is this … I found a particularly pleasantly designed site that was 100% missing the SEO of the Title tags and Description META tags on every page. (I find it amazing in today’s world of internet marketing, that a site designer could be ignorant of the need to include the HTML coded tags for optimization of the pages!)

Since There Was A Link At The Bottom Of The Pages For The Designer, I Clicked On It …

I was taken to a website boasting of the “fantastic” templates you could have designed for you, for a mere $199.00. OK … that’s darn reasonable, BUT!!  How could these designers overlook the simple insertion of the Title and Description tags in the template’s coding?

I guess once more the statement “you get what you pay for” holds true! lol

Egads! I’m going to say it again … in this day and age, how can anyone who claims to be a website designer not be aware of the proper coding needed in the HEAD section of the template? Come on! This is 2008, not 1998!

Well, once again everybody, my words of support continue to hold true to those of you who do pay attention to even the most basic steps of search engine optimization on your site. You WILL be ahead of 90% of the rest of your competition through the attention to SEO.

You know, I come across too many poor floundering sites every day during my SEO research. It really pains me at times when I find another sad site.  Normally, just by looking at the content and presentation, I can tell it is a very sincere person trying to be an internet marketer.  But they’re limping horribly with a totally unoptimized site.  I have to sigh, as I wonder how long it will be before either: (a) they give up (because they have no online presence); or (b) hopefully, the light goes on and they realize they are in desperate need of SEO attention.

Oh well … I’d better get back to my client’s site. And with a smile on my face, I know that by the time I am done putting my SEO magic to it, this client will be leading in the top-ten organic rankings in the very near future.