Online companies go through great lengths to create successful search engine optimization strategies for their sites. Why not take advantage of this when you are creating your own strategy? I’m not suggesting stealing a competitors strategy or blindly copying a strategy, but I do think success leads tracks. Follow these tracks and they might just lead you to success as well. I wrote this article to give you some tips on how you can analyze your competitors websites for more insight on how they have obtained their rankings.

The first thing you will need to do is determine who your competitors are in your field. Seek these companies out by doing searches in the major search engines. Take screen shots of the sites that come up on top for future use. Visit these search results again in a few days to see if they have dramatically changed in any way. When you come back, check to make sure the same competitors are still on the first page. Have these sites shifted at all? Are all of the sites still there?

The web pages that have stayed on the front page over the last few days are probably doing so for a reason, so click into these sites now. Take a look at the keyword density on the page. This can be done manually by copying and pasting the text into an open office document on our computer. Following this go to file, then properties, and then check the word count. Write this number down for later use. Next go through the document and see how many times the keyword is listed. Once you have these two numbers, you can do some division to determine the keyword density. For example, a page with 200 words and a keyword mentioned 4 times, has a keyword density of 2%. We determined this by dividing 4 by 200. The keyword density that is bringing your competitor success may be a good starting point for your keyword densities.

After you’ve finished this task, hit the back button and look at the search result once more. Study the title tag and determine its keyword density in the same manner you used on the actual site. Remember that your title tag should have a good keyword density, but should also draw visitors into your site. You won’t have people clicking on your title tag if you simply list the keywords X number of times among various spam words.

These first three methods have given you a good idea of who your major search engine competitors are and how they have their pages setup. This information alone will give you insight into how they have obtained their page ranking.

External criteria should be analyzed next for a clear picture of what your competitor is doing. You can do this yourself by manually checking links, or you can hire a company with solid search engine optimization packages for sale. Doing a task like this takes considerable time, and it may be best to leave it to the pros.

Thank you for reading this article on studying the competition. I hope the information you learned today brings you closer to the success you deserve.