Once you are holding a top search engine position your competition will undoubtedly renew their efforts to take back what you have replaced. Competitive analysis is a step that must be continuously taken to find out what you need to do to maintain a top position and should regularly track your competitor’s efforts to take back “their” former positions.
One competitive SEO tool that is used includes, FriendFeed, the application consolidating all of your social media activities across different networks in one place. If you are importing your Twitter feed, every time you tweet it will post to your Facebook wall. This may be preferable to updating your status with every tweet such as with the Twitter for Facebook application.
FriendFeed Helps Your Audience
Users can use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends. The goal of FriendFeed according to their website is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful for you by using your existing social network as a tool for discovering interesting information. Users can be an individual, business or organization. Many bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members’ social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr across a broad range of different social networks. It is common some are concerned about readers commenting on their posts inside FriendFeed instead of on their blogs, resulting in fewer page views for the blogger.
Onsite factors of your website SEO are the easiest to address as they are factors which are under your complete control. You have the power to change anything within your site from the content, internal linking structure, and even the design structure itself. Key onsite factors that must be considered in competition analysis are:
• Titles and meta tags
• Keyword density and content
• Special formats and positioning
However, there are many SEO related elements and tools that available to help determine what are the optimal levels. Generally these involve KDA (Keyword Density Analysis) tools. While meta tags definitely hold some weight, it is important that content titles are carefully created to insure that they hold maximum SEO effectiveness and appeal to most search engine users.
In analyzing the titles and meta tags combinations, you are looking for the optimal keyword density of those tags. A KDA tool will let you know what percentage of your competitions tags are made up of the targeted keywords. When you optimize your titles verify that you fall somewhere near the middle of the pack in order to gear your title tag to fall in the upper end of the range of densities so that visitors will consistently find your site in the search results.
You may also enhance SEO using special content formats including bold fonts, colors, anchor text, or any other content characteristics that sets specific text out as unique when a search engine is spidering your site. Positioning refers to the position of the keywords in relation to the entire content on a given page. Aside from this type of positioning there is also the consideration of how the content and keywords are prioritized relative to the code of the page.
Adding Competitive Intelligence
Today most successful business must regularly track competitors and uncover their not so hidden secrets. This important new media skill involves;
- Clearly identifying your competitors
- Check your competitors home pages for positioning changes
- Review your competitors trade show and seminar activity
- Create a competitive intelligence database of whitepapers and webinars
- Check who your competition is hiring and firing
You’ll gain a lot by making competitive intelligence part of your routine taking time, effort, and discipline! If you don’t have the time to invest in such activities, you can always stick to just using Google Alerts or Friendfeeds to get the top-level exposure and news about your competitors. Quality competitive analysis may not always come easy, but it will go a long way towards ensuring your business success.
The good news is that some new automated competitive intelligence tools are now starting to become available. For example, such tools can automatically scan company websites and deliver any new information that posted. You may want to consider one of these competitive tools to help increase your bottom line sales revenues.
