We now know our keywords
We understand that this is our battleground
We've gone on to Google (and the other main search engines) and typed in our keywords in order to find out who is currently on the top page for these keywords
We understand that these are the webpages that Google currently deems relevant for our keywords and that they are now our competitors

The purpose of this lesson is to grasp what our competitors have done in their optimization campaign to achieve the position they are in and better it!. The search engines will evaluate the Onpage factors of your website to get an idea of what its related to, this is where you are going to need to place your keywords into your actual page to best optimize your relevance. The more important aspect is the Offpage factors of your website, this is your link infrastructure from other websites who are related to you.

The main success of your battle will be the Offpage factors which is other websites linking to you which will boost your recognition as more relevant to your keywords.

Our starting point is to back to Google and do a search for our primary keyword. This will give you your list of competitors that you now need to analyze.

To continue on from our example we have taken our primary keyword "SEO Help " and carried out a search on google. Here we can see the current top 10 websites for the keyword phrase "SEO Help" and will use this to analyze what is in place and what we need to put in place ourselves.

If we click on the website: ??? in position one we can start our analysis of the onpage factors.

Onpage factors:

Introduce what onpage is and how we are going to record what they have done.

1. The first thing we look at is whether the website is a homepage or a subpage. The top website here is a subpage which means that as we're optimizing for a homepage we could be seen as more valuable.

2. The Page Rank of the Page

3. Title of the page

4. Meta Tags

5. Page Content - keyword density and keyword placement.

6. Highlighted keywords - Header tags, bold, italic, underline

7. Related Links

Offpage factors:

Introduce what offpage is and how we are going to record what they have done.

You can do this manually or use a search engine optimization software program.

1. Links from other websites of relevance

2. Onpage factors of these websites

You can see that this is the time consuming part of search engine optimization link to lesson 6

What the software will do. - we use software to save time!

Whether you've carried out this competitor analysis manually or through an SEO Software program you now know what you need to implement to your own website, starting with your own onpage optimization. Now we know our competitors optimization strategy in Lessons 4 and 5 we'll look at implementing it ourselves and then ways in which we can better it to strengthen our position.

Go to Step 5 - Using Search Engine Optimization Software

SEO Self Help recommends SEO Elite for successful search engine optimization campaigns.