SEO is more than writing a few words on a page and hoping you’ll get ranked. You’ve got to do your research and a part of that research is competitive research. By checking out your competition and learning from their best moves, you can effectively beat them at their own game. But which competitors should you focus on?

It might be tempting to look only at your competitors at the top of the search rankings, but that would be foolish. You need to look at the big picture. A person can be No. 1 today and drop down to page 2 tomorrow. The search results are littered with pages that have achieved high rankings through spam and other dubious practices. You certainly don’t want to copy them. What goes up also comes down.

Rather, when you scope out your competition, take a look at the content on their pages, scan their meta tags, and take a look at other factors like link popularity and off-site SEO. Are they doing something that you can learn from?

One strategy I like to use is to get a list of all the keywords in the competition’s keywords meta tag then search each search engine to see where the company ranks for that keyword. But I don’t do it just one time. If I do it once a week for about six weeks then I can see who is consistent with their rankings and who isn’t. The competitors you want to pay the most attention to are the ones who have age going in their favor. If they’ve been around awhile and they consistently rank high for the best keywords then it means they are doing something right.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under SEO. 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.