On-Page Optimization: Have You Taken A Good Hard Look At The Competition’s SEO?

• 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