Competitor Research for SEO
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 | Author: Kate

Competitor research and analysis may seem like a copycat activity, but it is not (at least not entirely). It is about understanding what your competitors are doing. It is about examining their keyword and linking strategies while realising their current strengths and weaknesses. The bottom line is that you are trying to understand what is making your competitors rank.
This activity may comprise elements of emulation, but what you are really trying to do is be better than your competition. Being better (in a general sense) means providing a site with more value and better perception. In an SEO sense, it means understanding all the things that make your competitors rank. When learning about your competition, it is good to examine their past and present activities, as well as implement ways to track their future activities.

Finding Your Competition

Before you can analyse your competitors, you need to know who your competitors are.How do you find your biggest competitors? One way to do this is to find sites that rank for your targeted keywords. The sites that sell or provide products and services similar to yours are your competitors.
There is a catch if you’re relying only on keywords, though. How do you know whether you are targeting the right keywords? What if you miss important keywords? You may be starting off in the wrong direction. This makes it all the more important to do your keyword research properly. No tool or activity will ever be perfect. You have to start somewhere.
When starting your competitor research, you will almost always want to start with your local competition. Visit the local online business directories in your niche to find potential competition.

If you have global competitors, see whether you can learn anything from their online presence. Just focusing on your local competition can be a mistake, especially if you will be providing products and services globally. Even if your business or clients are all local, you can still pick up tips from your global equivalents. Chances are someone is doing something similar somewhere else in the world. Create a list of 10 to 20 global competitors.

And start analysing your competition.

Ask SEO Consultant for more detail.

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Link Building in SEO
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 | Author: Kate

The link-building process is one of the pillars of SEO. It helps increase your site’s public awareness while also helping you attain higher search engine rankings. The number of inbound links to your site is a measure of its popularity. Each backlink is a vote for your site. All votes count, but search engines do not view them in the same way. Focus your efforts on links that will bring in the most value to your site. The most effective way to build great links is to build great content. Creating open source software, a free service, a browser plug-in, interesting content, a web comic, or any other value-add feature will work.

Internal link-building activities include the creation of link bait. There are many types of link bait. You can also use the social bookmarking paradigm to your advantage. Social bookmarks help make it easy for your visitors to remember, bookmark and share your site’s content. Social bookmarks can help bring huge amounts of inbound traffic to your site. Social bookmarks can help your SEO strategy!

Using website syndication is the norm for any serious site on the Internet today. Whether you want to use RSS or Atom feeds, syndicate as much of your content as possible. You can use services such as FeedBurner to obtain stats about your feeds.

Precursors to Link Building
Link building takes time. You want to make sure your time is not wasted. Before you start your link-building campaign, perform some research to ensure that you invest your time wisely.

Even if you don’t have a site today, you can still help your future business by being a part of various Internet communities. You can start your own blog, contribute articles to authority sites in your niche, and become active in social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn. When the appropriate time comes, expose your new business website across all of these channels that were cultivated over time. Granted, not everyone has the time to do this. In you fall into this category, you can use the classic networking approach: stay in touch with your contacts. When you are ready, let them know what you are working on and ask them to help promote your new site by adding links on their sites (and therefore, spreading your news to their contacts).

If you are just starting with a new website, assessing your current situation should be fairly straightforward. If your site is not live yet, you may still have some links pointing to it. This may be the case if you bought an expired domain that still has some residual links, or if you have let others know of your site prior to it being officially live.
If you are working with an existing site, it is important to evaluate the current state of your inbound links. Check your web stats logs with Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, or any other web tracking software that shows your referrals. Aggregate this information in a list so that you can get a baseline before starting your new link-building campaign (this will enable you to properly measure your campaign results).

It makes sense to know what link-building strategies your competitors are using. It would be foolish to ignore their linking strategies. As link building takes time, missing out on specific link-building strategies could be costly. When looking for competitors, you should start with local ones, as that information may be easier to find. Look at your local business listings as well as the Yellow Pages specific niche directories, and similar resources. Pick up your local newspapers and see whether you can find some competitors. Get a good sample of old and new businesses and research their inbound links. Go after sites that link to your competitors. Don’t stop at emulation. See whether you can do better than what they have done. Just because your competitors are ranking high in a particular niche does not mean they have done their due diligence. They may just be playing the field by themselves.

After examining your competition and analysing your current state, you are ready to formulate some link-building goals. Shoot for the stars, but be realistic. Optimise your time by going after links that will provide most of the benefits. Go after reputable, authoritative, and noncompeting sites that are related to your site.

It is important to reiterate that the best way to bring in desired links is to create something outstanding. Unique, compelling content is the best way to achieve your link-building strategy. Be creative as you produce content for your target demographic.
Be different.

Check SEO Services for more details.

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The Tracking Cycle: Produce, Launch, Measure, Refine
Sunday, June 06th, 2010 | Author: Kate

In summary, the basic process usually looks something like this:

1. Define an SEO campaign and set goals.
   What are you going to accomplish, and what is the strategy for accomplishing it?  How will you measure progess?

2. Discuss your strategy.
   The marketing and business development teams are your allies here – you want to ensure that your SEO objectives are based on the overall business and site objectives, both long and short term.

3. Establish a baseline.
Now that you are about to start and you have decided how you are going to measure progress, establish a baseline by recording the current stats prior to beginning work. Make sure you don’t get false baseline due to seasonal factors or some other unusual event.

4. Proceed with your project.
Implement the new pages, the site changes, the link building campaign, or whatever you have planned. Put it in place and execute.

5. Collect data.
Collect the newest data for each metric you decided to focus on. Since this is SEO and SEO can take many months to show results, make sure you wait long enough for your efforts to have an impact. Of course, if you are a student of the process, you can take more frequent measurements so that you can see how things begin to progress over time. For many on page changes, 60 to 90 days are enough, but for link building campaigns it may take six months or more to see the full impact. Many factors could influence the length of time you should wait. Here are some of them:

  • If your site is brand new, it may take longer for your changes to take effect.
  • If the scope of the change is drastic (such as a complete redesign), the time to see result will probably be longer.
  • Sites that get crawled at great depth and frequency will probably yield results faster.
  • Sites seen as authoritative may also show faster results.

6. Compare the baseline data to the new data.
The new data has little meaning unless it is compared to your baseline. This is the time when you can really assess your progress.

7. Refine your campaign.
Now that you have compared your old data, you can make some decisions. Is the campaign a bust? If so, abandon it and move on to the nezt one. The old business axiom “Fall quickly” applies here. The faster you diagnose a failure and move on the next thing, the better.

You may also find you are getting mediocre results. Examining the data more closely may give you some ideas as to how you can improve those results. And if you are achieving great results, look for ways to scale the effort and drive even more volume.

If you need more advice or help, contact with SEO consultant.

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