Competition Analysis Basics for SEO

In my last article titled, “Keyword Research Basics for SEO” I discussed keyword research and the basics of keyword selection. Of course – you can’t solidify your targets until you understand what you’re up against. All the keyword research in the world won’t help you rank for the keyword phrase “windows” in 6 months with a brand new site. So understanding how to analyze your competitors and get a feel for who you can compete with in a reasonable period of time is paramount to creating a solid strategy. I’ll also be flashing back a bit on keyword strategy.

In the last article we closed with a list of potential keyword phrases, the idea that we needed to divide our phrases into major phrases and longtail phrases and also a new domain (just to keep things realistic). So where do we go from there?
Generally I start at the top. From the highest searched phrases to the lowest – I do a quick analysis of the major phrases to determine the long term goals and the short term. I also like to look for what I call “holes”. These are phrases that have competition levels lower than one would expect when looking at the search volume. So let’s use the example I was using in the last article and imagine a US-based downhill mountain bike company. And let’s begin with the major targets.
The phrases we’ll examine for the purposes of this article are the top 10 phrases as ordered by search volume. They are:

• mountain bike
• mountain bikes
• specialized mountain bike
• trek mountain bike
• mountain bike frame
• full suspension mountain bike
• cannondale mountain bike
• giant mountain bike
• mountain bike parts
• mountain bike reviews
  

So what are we looking for? It’s obviously not feasible to do incredibly thorough competition analysis at this stage. I’ve listed 10 phrases here but in reality there are hundreds to consider and so we need a quick(ish) way to determine the competition levels of phrases. First, let’s install a couple tools to help you make some quick decisions. You’ll need to install the Firefox browser and the SEO Quake add on. Now when you run a search you’ll be able to quickly pull the competitor stats. I like to look at the PageRank, links to the ranking page and sitelinks. Remember now – this is the basic competitor analysis here.
Here are the stats for the top 10 ranking sites across the 10 top phrases (I’ll leave out the URLs so there’s no promotion):
Phrase: mountain bike
Site 1 – PR6, 70,268 page links, 71,177 domain links
Site 2 – PR6, 262,609 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 3 – PR5, 0 page links, 604 domain links
Site 4 – PR6, 101,136 page links, 206,397 domain links
Site 5 – PR5, 741 page links, 118,791,902 domain links
Phrase: mountain bikes
Site 1 – PR5, 33,097 page links, 40,747 domain links
Site 2 – PR6, 42,010 page links, 91,385 domain links
Site 3 – PR6, 262,609 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 4 – PR6, 101,136 page links, 206,397 domain links
Site 5 – PR5, 25,059 page links, 38,132 domain links
Phrase: specialized mountain bikes
Site 1 – PR6, 101,136 page links, 206,397 domain links
Site 2 – PR1, 1 page links, 206,397 domain links
Site 3 – PR4, 2,001 page links, 2,095 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 734 page links, 738 domain links
Site 5 – PR2, 4 page links, 230 domain links
Phrase: trek mountain bikes
Site 1 – PR6, 65,464 page links, 178,712 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 108 page links, 178,712 domain links
Site 3 – PR4, 127 page links, 523 domain links
Site 4 – PR4, 2,001 page links, 2,095 domain links
Site 5 – PR0, 0 page links, 3,854,233 domain links
Phrase: mountain bike frame
Site 1 – PR4, 6,348 page links, 44,535 domain links
Site 2 – PR2, 6 page links, 4,303 domain links
Site 3 – PR4, 196 page links, 523 domain links
Site 4 – PR0, 28 page links, 35 domain links
Site 5 – PR1, 0 page links, 294,361,703 domain links
Phrase: full suspension mountain bike
Site 1 – PR4, 58 page links, 178,712 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 20 page links, 1,729 domain links
Site 3 – PR3, 7 page links, 9,959,894 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 240 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 5 – PR3, 0 page links, 294,362,703 domain links
Phrase: cannondale mountain bikes
Site 1 – PR6, 62,614 page links, 91,301 domain links
Site 2 – PR6, 410 page links, 91,301 domain links
Site 3 – PR4, 0 page links, 2,056 domain links
S ite 4 – PR3, 3 page links, 80,580 domain links
Site 5 – PR2, 3 page links, 9,959,894 domain links
Phrase: giant mountain bikes
Site 1 – PR3, 7 page links, 136,232 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 2,001 page links, 2,095 domain links
Site 3 – PR0, 6 page links, 6 domain links
Site 4 – PR4, 2,262 page links, 2,392 domain links
Site 5 – PR2, 1 page links, 60,131 domain links
Phrase: mountain bike parts
Site 1 – PR4, 610 page links, 2,366 domain links
Site 2 – PR4, 851 page links, 4,303 domain links
S ite 3 – PR4, 6,348 page links, 44,535 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 4,612 page links, 20,931 domain links
Site 5 – PR6, 4,612 page links, 20,931 domain links
Phrase: mountain bike reviews
Site 1 – PR6, 262,609 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 2 – PR5, 240 page links, 290,281 domain links
Site 3 – PR6, 560 page links, 361,873 domain links
Site 4 – PR5, 0 page links, 604 domain links
Site 5 – PR4, 22 page links, 90,123 domain links
Now, I’d definitely look further down my keyword list than this but for the purposes of this article let’s assume this is all we have. If that’s the case – what do you suppose would be the primary choice(s)? Were it to me I’d go with:
mountain bike frame – we have a range of PageRank, a range of links and a range of sites. Basically – we’re not up against a wall of high competition and the search volume is solid.
full suspension mountain bike – a full range of sites. Higher competition than “mountain bike frame” but we’re looking at a phrase that would sell a whole bike which needs to be considered and a slightly higher competition is thus acceptable.
So of these two phrases what would I do? Well – if this was all we had to work with I’d select “full suspension mountain bike” as the main phrase and follow that up with “mountain bike frame” as a major secondary phrase and thus a prime target for proactive internal page link building and optimization.
So now let’s look at whether there are any good longtail phrases. In this industry we’ll be looking for specific parts. Since going through all the different types of parts would be a nightmare in an article I’ll focus on a couple parts I just ordered recently and that was a new handlebar and and a new rim. To keep things simple I’m going to focus on just a couple brands in the research BUT in reality we’d take the extra time and look into all the part types and all the brands that we’d be able to sell on our site.
So for handlebars, here’s the long and short of the numbers and competition:
Brands researched – origin and easton
“easton handlebars” with 1,000 estimated searches/mth with low competition outside of the manufacturer is a great start. Further, when we look up the manufacturer we further see that the ea70 and ea90 Easton models are both sought after as well.
When we build our site we obviously want to build a structure and heirarchy that are conducive to longtail rankings overall but what we’re looking for here are ideas as to where to put our energies when it comes to content creation and link building. Handlebars looks good by search volume. The average sale per item would be around $25.
And now to rims:
Brands researched – mavic and sun
“mavic rims” and “sun rims” both come in at 1,900 estimated searches but the comeptition for “sun rims” is significantly lower with lower link counts and lower PageRank sites ranking. The average sale here is also going be in the $40 to $45 range.
Based on this my first efforts for the whole site wold be “full suspension mountain bike” for the homeapge, mountain bike frame” as a major internal page and I’d focus my first efforts on “rims” (“sun rim” specifically).
Now – we’d of course look further than this but what we can see is the direction that we’d go if all we had to go on was the above data. As noted – were we launching this site we’d look into every brand and every part type and research further than the top 10 phrases but that would have made for a book, not and article and let’s be honest – it would have been a very boring book unless you were planning on launching a mountain bike site.
So now you’ve done enough competition analysis (remember – it’s basic research we’re talking about) to figure out what direction to head in. In my next article I’m going to cover more advanced competition analysis. We’ll go in knowing what we want to accomplish in the way of keywords and be working to map out how to take the top spots.
Until then – get your campaigns sorted out for potential keywords and keep reading … this is where it gets really interesting.

From Link Centric to Well Rounded

I am tired of so many new and old SEOs talk about linking, the importance of it and how your efforts will be wasted if you don’t embrace it. I like linking and believe it provides a good way to build credibility on the search engines, especially for new sites, but I put it last on my list. That’s right I said last. I may be old school but I have found I can cut back my dependency (time) on the number/quality of incoming links if I follow some basic principles.
Site Content I can go on and on about the content of the site but here are a few tips to get you started:

• Know your audience spend time figuring out who your online audience really is and how they look for your services. How? I like to use Word Tracker and Aaron Wall’s keyword suggestion tool but there are other tools you may like better, Keyword Discovery and Wordze are both highly recommended. Once you find your audience it is worth spending a little money on Adwords to find out which keywords give you the best conversion rate and target those particular phrases.
• Know your competition – Once you know how people are looking for your goods/services spend some time finding out what the competition is doing. We have some custom tools to help us out with this but there are some free online tools that will give you the keyword density for each highly ranked page. Once you have the densities and number of words on highly ranked pages I suggest you go to Yahoo! Site Explorer and figure out how many links they have coming back to their site. The fewer links they have the less important being competitive on content becomes. You can also use SEO Quake for this research.
• Be Competitive - After you have this information in hand you will have a general idea as to what you need to shoot for to be competitive on the SERPS. Spending more time on content will allow you the room to spend less time on building links.

Site Structure/On Page Optimization – having a well structured site is a basic fundamental of good overall usability and accessibility with new standards. Take a look at SEOMoz’s breakdown (an oldie but still relevant)

• CSS If your site is still using tables you are getting close to being an entire decade behind the curve. If you’re not a designer and don’t plan on learning CSS you can find plenty of services who will handle this task for you. If you do plan on learning CSS you may want to start at W3Schools.
• Title tags Make sure your title tags support the text on the page and that the text on the page is focused on a specific topic or set of keyword phrases. If you sell widgets don’t talk about your awesome new building on your widgets page. Remember your title tag is going to show up in the SERPs, so this is your chance to sell against your competition.
• Keywords in the URL Change the URL of the page to contain keywords that represent what the page is about. You will be better off putting a "-" between the words than any other characters example: blue-hand-widgets.html.
• Heading Tags Make sure to use heading tags (H1, H2, H3) to separate your thoughts. Using heading tags tell search engines what the most important items are on your page.
• Keywords in links Your links should contain keywords and it is ALWAYS a good idea to use your own link juice to pass value from your internal pages. If you leverage your internal linking structure correctly you could drastically cut back your dependency on incoming links for internal pages, leaving you more time to focus on your homepage.

Hosting Atmosphere – make sure your hosting atmosphere is equipped to handle 301 redirects and make sure they aren’t hosting link farms or other sites that could potentially damage your ranking.

• Duplicate Content – Make sure you are using 301 Redirects from your www to your non-www or vice versa and if you are using multiple domains. You need to choose one main domain and have the others redirect. This helps ensure you won’t have duplicate content penalties. You may also want to look into CopyScape or other services that will check for duplicate content.
• Bad Neighbors make sure you are not receiving penalties because of other people on your IP or IP block. This one is a little more complicated but should be considered and you can use Bad-Neighborhood.com for free.

Finally Linking now that you have created a well rounded site focus on getting high quality links.

• Directories I will usually do a few directories just because they are the low hanging fruit. Submit Eaze has a great product that helps you automate the submission of your site to both free and paid directories.
• Contact your Partners too often people forget they have affiliates and partners they can use a resources. Contact those people and ask them to place a link to your site. Also remember to give them the HTML to make it easier for them to implement.
• Research your competitors Find out what links are coming back to your competitors sites and find out why they are linking to your competitors. Once you have this list you can start creating a plan to get listed on the same sites and start building your link credibility. You can use Yahoo! Site Explorer but I personally like using Link Harvester

These are a few tips that can help you to have a better site and get better rankings without spending tons of money or time building links. If you focus on the quality/content of your site you will begin to see more links and better rankings naturally. The link centric approach only leads to spending more time and resources to keep up without a well designed site.

Cara pasang meta tag description dan keywords

Cara Pasang Meta Tag Description Dan Keywords | SEO Guide

Description dan keywords memegang peranan yang cukup penting dalam membantu memudahkan search engines seperti google, yahoo dan lain-lain dalam menemukan file dalam database pencariannya.

Pada saat kita mengetik suatu kata kunci atau keyword di google search atau search engine lainnya, maka search engine akan menampilkan hasil dari pencarian yang sesuai dengan keyword yang kita masukan tersebut. Oleh karena itu dengan memasang keyword dan description pada template blog kita itu di perlukan jika kita ingin halaman blog yang kita buat lebih mudah ditemukan dalam index search engine. Pada panduan dan tutorial gratis kali ini kita akan belajar memasang meta tag description dan keywords di dalam template blogger blogspot.

Untuk memasang meta description dan keeywords tersebut silakan ikuti panduan sebagai berikut:

1. Login ke blogger.com.

2. Klik 'Design' kemudian klik 'EDIT HTML'.

3. Dowload full template Anda terlebih dahulu sebagai back up agar jika Anda melakukan kesalahan dalam mengedit template maka bisa di restore kembali.
4. Masih dalam "EDIT HTML", centang kotak "Expand Template Widget", cari di template Anda kode seperti ini:



5. Letakkan kode meta tag dibawah ini tepat dibawah kode diatas:



Ket: Pada tulisan "DESCRIPTION HERE" ganti dengan deskripsi judul blog Anda, pada tulisan "YOUR KEYWORDS HERE" ganti dengan keywords atau kata kunci yang sesuai dengan isi blog Anda. Keyword dapat Anda isi dengan lebih dari 1 keyword dan tidak lebih dari 20 keyword/kata kunci. Penulisannya dipisahkan dengan tanda koma (,) contoh:



6. Save Template.