SEO: Step 2 Competition research

Search engines and other online tools give us a great deal of insight into our competitor's online campaigns. Before jumping head first into the optimization of our sites, we should thoroughly understand what our competitors are doing online. At the same time, you should not overestimate your competitors ability to find the best suited keywords. You should practice due diligence and verify your competitors' keyword selection with the methods we have outlined in the Keyword Research lesson.

How can we define our competition?

• Search commands provided by Google allow you to assess your competition fairly accurately; command:keyword phrase.

• Finding the Anchor link text used by competitors (allinanchor)

• Use a simple query with our keyword phrase in quotation marks to asses the number of other pages competing for that exact keyword term(s).

• Google "allinanchor" command will find all the websites using the specified keyword phrase in internal or external link text (anchor text); allinanchor:second mortgage.

• Finding the Title tag used by competitors (allintitle)

• Google "allintitle" searches the title tag of web pages for the keyword phrase entered.

• Find related sites using Google's related command (related)

• Google "related" command returns a list of pages that Google thinks are related to your site and competitor's site.

• Use Google's "define" search command (defined)

• Google will show you all the websites that are considered valuable resources on those subject matter.

• Adding a glossary page containing your industry specific keyword terms and their definitions is a great idea.

• Spyfu is a free research tool for discovering the keywords and ads your competitors are using on Google.

• Google Alerts will send you email alerts based on your and competitor's keywords. This is a great way to find out what's being said about you and your competitors.

Keyword effectiveness index (KEI)

• According to Wordtracker, "the KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign."

• KEI value of 40 or higher considered very good and indicates a less competitive keyword phrase.

• KEI does not take into consideration, link popularity, PageRank, and a number of other "off-page" factors which contribute to high search engine ranking. Relying strictly on the KEI alone could greatly under or overestimate the competitiveness of a keyword. A much better and more accurate competition assessment tool is the Google "allinanchor, and "allintitle" commands.

Reference: http://www.trendmx.com/seo/step-2-competition-research.aspx