First of all, remember that competition is good for any business. It’s what keeps you growing, and also keeps you innovative. It stops your business from becoming stale. You have to strive to be one step ahead of your competition, and the best way to do that is to know what he/she is all about. To do this you must analyze your competitor and if you do this well, then you will only serve to enhance your search engine marketing. Here is an analytical format that you may find useful. Don’t think that you are doing something deceitful or unfair. It’s not like you are stealing secrets. You are learning from someone else’s success. There are no secrets to educating oneself in any field or industry. In addition, you are not doing anything that your competitor won’t do, and probably is doing. This knowledge is helping them to keep ahead of the competition.

URL Structure: Firstly find out how the URL of the competitor looks, whether they are static/dynamic, whether they are written with words giving a brief idea about the content of the webpage.

What does the Meta Data tell you?: Determine what key words are showing the meta data. Now compare these with the first page title and description. Can you see the same keywords there?

Locate the site map. You need to see how well laid out the site navigation is. It should be quick and easy to get from one area to another. The links to the various pages should be text links. These are the types of links that the major search engines prefer. It is well worth the time to plan your navigation properly. There are some areas that you can rush in your website building but this is one area that you will to really devote some attention to.

The link backs are very important, as they should be on your site as well. There must be a good quantity of them. Quantity is not enough though, they must also be high quality links as well. The major search engines base decisions on these links. For example if they are good quality, and there are lots linking to the site, then the search engines figures the site must be good, and they will view it the same way. So when it comes time to ranking they will base their scores on these findings.

The age of your site: The search engines take a close look at the age of the websites.

See how many pages the competition has on their site. Now determine how many of those pages have been indexed with the major search engines. Google, MSN and Yahoo are quite easily able to index top ranking sites.

Home Page PR – It is the Google Page Rank. Google gives a 0-10 score for assessing the value of the webpage. This is generally dependent on the quality and quantity of incoming links. It is the most popular metric for all the webmasters to check. It can be checked by the Google Toolbar or a site like PRChecker.

Every website should have some important pages. These are the pages where you will learn the most from in respect to the competitor’s success. You can utilize an online tool like SEOmoz to help you find the information you need. Once again its going to point back to the success of the links. You are going to get a very good idea as to how strong their content is by knowing what their ranking is. Strive to make every page on your website an important one. If you set your standards high, then you will be constantly striving to meet your goals and monitor the continued growth of your site. It is very important that you do not allow your site to become stale.

Want to find out more about Search Engine Optimisation, then visit Robert Harvard’s site on how to do the best SEO Web Hosting for your needs.