Looking at what and how your competition have positioned their website where you want yours to be placed will lend great insight into how to get yours there.

Competition analysis is a step that must be taken to find out what you need to do to take a top position but which also should be performed periodically to detect your competitor’s efforts to take back “their” former positions

Onsite Factors – Onsite factors of your website 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 and Special formats and positioning

· Title And Meta Tags – your title tag is the gateway from the search engine results to your website: insure you’ve created an attractive welcome mat.Titles on the other hand hold significant weight and must be created carefully to insure that they hold maximum SEO effectiveness and also that they appeal to the searchers.. In analyzing the titles and meta tags essentially you are looking for the optimal keyword density of those tags.

· Keyword Density And Content – KDA (Keyword Density Analysis) tool to find the optimal density for your industry will give you a good idea of any content changes you may need to make. From here you will want to look at two additional areas of your competitors sites. One which you can get from an advances KDA tool such as Total Optimizer Pro and the other you can get right from the engines themselves. Which brings us to

· Special Formats And Positioning – Special formats will be considered content elements such as bold, colors, anchor text, or any other content characteristics that sets specific text out as different when a search engine is spidering your site. The use of these formats, provided that it is done correctly, can not only help improve that rankings of your website for specific phrases but can also enhance the usability of your website in general by drawing the human eye to key content.

External SEO factors – External SEO factors generally refer to the internal links to your, and your competitor’s, website. To fully grasp how your competitors are ranking highly for your targeted phrases you will want to know a number of things about the links to their site including: How many links do they have? How many of these links come from the same sites? Are these sites relevant? What is the PageRank distribution of the links? Are these links image or text links and if text, what anchor text is used to link to your competitor’s site?