Analyze Your Competition Before Doing SEO
Working with Search Engine Optimization has come along way over the years. When it was first discovered that the search engines were matching up the words customers typed in a search bar with the words on various sites in order to produce a results page, web masters were just stuffing their content with what they considered the appropriate words. That was then, this is now. Search engines have developed complicated and sophisticated algorithms that can separate good, interesting content from pages that are just stuffed with keywords. They are even starting to separate good writing from “pabulum” as the Google Pandora algorithm has demonstrated.
SEOs have recognized this new reality and have refined their content to please the algorithms. You, as a marketer, web designer or web master, have to find out what the others are doing before you develop a SEO campaign.
Just jumping into SEO and writing articles using what you consider good keywords is not the total story to search engine optimization. You have to, of course, know what keywords your reader/users/customers are entering, but you also have to know how the competition fits into that equation. In other words, you have to look at supply in addition to demand. Google offers publishers a tool whereby you can see how proposed keywords are searched, and what the competition is, and then you can use their analytics tool to further define the uses.
WordTracker is one of the most popular programs to find out both the demand (how many people are using that word or phrase) and the supply (how many sites match that word or phrase on their sites). Your competitors are using keyword optimization tools for the Goldilocks solution: not too many, not too few, just the right amount.
You can further enhance your knowledge about what your competition is doing by using online software programs that analyze use of keywords. You can then find out not only how many other sites are using your ideal keywords, you can locate the sites that have the best success with them, and discover their placement and density of use. The keyword density is how many times it is used on a page, an important criteria for the engines.
So, whether you want to perform these analyses on your own, using Google or WordTracker, or you prefer to use a service that will do this for you, it is important that you know what the competitors are doing before you even get started. Otherwise, you will be doing a lot of pointless writing.