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Analysis Techniques

Typing your target keywords into a search engine only tells you the total number of results for those keywords not how hard it will be to get a top ten site ranking. Many of the pages are not even trying to compete for the keyword and are there by chance. To find the real competition you need to dig a little deeper. The first thing anyone might do to optimize their page is to include the keywords in the title. Google provides some useful advanced search operators that can help in this analysis. Entering

intitle:kw1 kw2... kw#

Will return all the pages where the keywords occur somewhere in the title. Putting the keywords in quotes means that the exact phrase must occur in the title, an even stronger indicator that they are your direct competition. You can also use allintitle which will match against the keywords in the order given. For example the keywords: laptop computer parts, returns 4.1 million results. In terms purely of PageRank you'd need to be a PR6 or PR7 site to compete in this space, quite a tall order. However the search intitle:laptop computer parts, returns 321,000 results. That is only around 8% of sites are competing for those keywords. Searching for the exact phrase with intitle:"laptop computer parts" returns only 779 pages.

The clincher will be off-page factors. We want to find out how many of those pages also have the keywords in the anchor text (hypertext) of either internal or inbound-links. We can do this with the search:

intitle:"kw1 kw2... kw#" inanchor:"kw1 kw2... kw#"

In our example we are left with a hardcore of 114 websites. The top ten had toolbar PageRanks between PR0 and PR5. We can use the Google link: operator to see how many inbound-links each page in the top ten has. However Google doesn't show a lot of inbound-links below PR4. Yahoo! appears to report much more accurate inbound-link figures. The query:

link:http://www.domain.com/ -site:www.domain.com

Will give the number of inbound-links excluding internal-links. Remember that internal links do count and you have complete control over the anchor text. We don't know how many of these inbound-links use relevant anchor text. This would require a more detailed analysis of the results pages. The result set can be further divided by using the inurl and intext operators to find pages with the keywords in the url and in the body text of the page. Running this query left a total of 58 results, barely 0.00014% of the original figure.

We could also check the keyword density of the competitor pages and the total number of pages on their site. The query site:www.domain.com gives the total number of pages indexed by Google or Yahoo!. As a general rule more pages in a website means better rankings. As an example the top ranked site on Google is currently Microsoft.com (search for the keyword http in Google to see the top ranked websites) with 314,000 pages indexed covering a vast range of computer related keywords.

SEO is an ongoing process. Other sites will be fine tuning their on and off page optimization factors in order to maintain or improve their ranking. The Google operators we have looked at can be used to prioritize the areas that need attention on existing pages. We'll assume that the page URL and Title already contain the relevant keywords. Here are some examples

inanchor position higher than search engine ranking: focus attention on on-page factors: title tags, content, keyword density, headings, bold/strong text, site structure
inanchor position lower than search engine ranking: build inbound links with relevant keywords in anchor text
good ranking but smaller site compared to competition: add new content focussing on target keyword combinations

Analysis Techniques

See Also