Step Wise SEO

You’ll be researching the following elements to determine whether there is any evidence of SEO in your competitors’ sites:

• Targeted keywords
• General characteristics of the site In the following sections, we’ll go into the finer points:

Targeted Keywords
First, try to determine what, if any, keywords your Big Five competitors are targeting.

Sometimes a competitor’s targeted keywords will make themselves clear if you simply review the text on their site.

It’s a fair bet that your competitors are targeting many of the same keywords that you are, so you can glance through their page content and look for those terms or for similar terms that you may have considered for your own site.

But are they actually targeting these terms for SEO, or did their copywriter just get lucky with word choice?

The quickest way to get a read on a competitor’s SEO schemes is to view the meta keywords tag.

You’ll need to look into the source code to do this. Inside the tag, your competitor’s keyword list might include 500 words, it might be ridiculously un-optimized (formatted as a sentence or full of words like a, an, the, and quality), or it might seem to be a tightly focused, relevant list from which you can glean a hint of a strategy.

While you’re in the code, look for keywords in the HTML title and meta description too.
By the way, if you’ve never stepped through someone else’s HTML code, it can be a little disorienting.

It can help to use your browser’s find function (usually Ctrl+F, or Edit > Find in the browser menu) to search for the words meta or title. These should land you in the general vicinity of the tags you’re looking for.

For each of your Big Five competitors, open the home page and at least one other page on their site to scan the copy and view the tags.

You aren’t looking to record the top 50 terms here, just the ones that seem to be in direct competition with your own conversion goals.

As you’re sniffing around your competitors’ page content and tags, you may find a keyword here or there that you hadn’t thought of.

General Characteristics of the Website
Give your competitors’ websites a spin and try to identify anything that’s important about their sites’ structure as it relates to SEO.

Are important pages hidden behind a login or locked inside a database? Is their entire site developed with Flash, or is too much of their message presented as graphical text?

(To determine whether website text is graphical or HTML, try to highlight it with your mouse.

If you can highlight one letter at a time, it’s HTML. If you can only highlight the entire word plus some of the background, it’s graphical.)

Is the site particularly text heavy? Does the site have useful, unique, or constantly changing noncommercial content that might increase its linkability?

You’ll naturally be curious about lots of other, not-just-for-SEO factors as you click around your competitors’ sites, like fun features that you covet for your own site.

There’s nothing wrong with keeping track of those elements somewhere, too (Task Journal entry, anyone?).

But for our purposes, we’d just like you to jot down your general impressions. Here are some examples of General Site Characteristics notes:

• This site has a tendency to overuse graphical text.
• Not once on this site was the long form of the acronym AMC spelled out!
• There’s a ton of text, which is good for SEO, but it causes their design to suffer.