While keyword optimization plays a vital role in getting you access to those coveted “top positions” in search results, competition analysis is an equally important factor too. Once we know exactly what our competitors are doing, only then can we figure out how to do it better than them! Therefore, the 3-step program to success is:

1. Search for your competitive websites
2. Analyze the competitive websites
3. Surpass your competitive websites

Now that we get the big picture of what we need to do, let us look into the details of each step.

Searching For Your Competition

This step is fairly easy. If you have already read “The #1 Keyword Secret That You Always Wanted To Know“, then you must have already worked out the most competitive keyword phrases in your particular product segment. So you must already be familiar with the list of keyword phrases that seem to be doing the trick for your competitors.

So simply search for those exact keyword phrases on various search engines, and make a list of the top websites displayed in the results. These are your competitors - the ones you have to beat, in order to get their traffic directed towards your website. You have to work your way up, to a position higher than these websites. How? Read on.

Analyzing the Competition

Analyzing the competitive websites in your market segment is probably the most difficult and the most time-consuming part of the process. That’s because you have to go through each of your competitive websites individually, for a whole set parameters, like:

• The design and layout of the site (color scheme, fonts, positioning of important page elements, level of interaction with the users)
• The keyword combinations on which the site pages have been optimized
• The content of the top ranking pages, and the positioning and density of keyword phrases in those pages
• Finding and analyzing the link partners of your competitive websites (how high they rank, the kind of content on their pages, their traffic, what kind of content pages on your competitive websites are they linking to)
• The product range of your competition, and the ways they have used to encourage their visitors to take action and become customers

As you can see, this is a mammoth task, requiring several man-hours of hard work per website you analyze.

Surpassing Your Competition

Once you have completed this process however, that’s when you reach the stage where you can actually work out ways to make your website better than your competitors in all respects mentioned above.

However, time is a crucial factor here. In today’s dynamic world, statistics tend to become “outdated” at the drop of a hat! So if it’s going to take you weeks, or even months, to go through the research and analysis of your competition, by the time you have worked out any substantial improvement methods for your own website, they would have made improvements in their websites too. You don’t expect them to be sitting idle, do you?

So the whole purpose of doing this elaborate research and analysis on your competition stands defeated if you cannot take advantage of their weaknesses right now! You have worked out what seems to be working for them and where they lack. So if you can act faster than them, and exploit their areas of weakness immediately, you can beat them at their own game.

Well then, is there any quicker method of doing the competition analysis? As a matter of fact, there is. There is a way to automate the entire process of competition research, analysis and implementation of improvements. Find out how you can do this with SEO Equalizer right now.

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In this article, I am going to cover how you can select the best performing keywords and phrases for your business.

Before I go into that, let’s first discuss the purpose of setting up any business, virtual or real. A business is set up with the intention of making profits from it, right? And how can we make higher profits? There are several ways of doing this actually. The most important ways, however, are:

1. By cutting costs
2. By increasing sales

This article deals with both these methods of increasing revenues and turning your online venture into a money-minting enterprise! But first we’ll see how we can increase the sales volume by attracting more free traffic to your website with the use of correct keywords.

What Are Keywords?

When a person, belonging to the market segment you are targeting at, wants to search for your product on the internet, he opens up a search engine first, like Google, AltaVista, MSN, Yahoo or HotBot. He then enters a specific word, or a combination of words, to search for your product. Then, depending upon how well a particular webpage has been optimized for that specific combination of words, it is displayed in the search results. Needless to say, the better optimized pages are displayed first, and as such, they have a higher probability of a click through, leading to a potential sale.

Keyword Research And Analysis

This means that if you want to increase traffic to your website, you need to find out what keyword combinations in your industry are being searched for the most, and then optimize the pages in your site accordingly, so that they are displayed at the top positions in the search engine results. This is what is called keyword research and analysis.

In simple words, keyword research helps in searching for competitive keywords and phrases, and then analyzing those keywords and phrases in order to surpass your competition.

1. Keyword research helps you find the number of times a particular keyword has been searched for.
2. It also gives you the alternate phrases that can be used for a particular keyword.
3. Keyword research lists your various competing sites for that particular keyword.
4. It helps you track your website’s search engine position for the various keywords and phrases related to your product niche.
5. Keyword analysis helps you optimize your pages for certain keywords and phrases, based on keyword density and keyword location.

Use Of Automated SEO Software For Keyword Research And Analysis

By using some SEO software for keyword research and analysis, you are able to:

1. Completely automate the entire process of research, analysis, and optimization which is associated with highly targeted keywords
2. Quickly analyze why a particular website has a higher ranking for a certain keyword or phrase
3. Conduct a quick and easy automatic optimization of your web pages for the specified keyword phrases, turning them into lean and mean search engine magnets

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