The Faceup Web Marketing eBook can now be downloaded for FREE from the eBook page!  Within seconds you can download the definitive guide to search engine optimization and search engine marketing for small to mid-size websites.  The book was recently updated to include the latest keyword research tools, link building tactics, and more.

One of the most telling things you can do in any business is study your competitors. Your competition can reveal weakness in your business and open your eyes to new opportunities in your industry. The same is true in the web world, and with search engine optimization in particular. Why does your competitor consistently rank higher than you for important terms? What programming, content, and link building strategies are they using to help attain those rankings? Answer those questions and you’ll be one step closer to out-ranking them and bringing that traffic and those sales to your site.

Who should you study?
A lot of industries will have hundreds of direct competitors, and many more indirect competitors. You can very easily get caught up in “paralysis by analysis” if you try to analyze every possible competitor that you have. The purpose of studying your competition is to better your business, so I prefer to limit my analysis to ten sites or less.

You probably already know a handful of your adversaries. Either they were the incumbent leaders in your industry when you began, or your customers constantly remind you that they have lower prices, or every time you Google a phrase in your industry they come up first in the search results. Those sites are the first ones you should add to your list to research. Fill the rest of the list in by picking sites that consistently rank high for the most searched phrases related to your business. If you haven’t already done keyword research, I recommend starting with the SEO Book Keyword Research Tool. Once you understand which terms are searched the most, it will be pretty obvious which sites consistently rank high.

What information should you collect?
There are a plethora of potential metrics that can be used to gauge the competition. The six below can be collected for free in a matter of minutes and do a great job of explaining why a site ranks as well as it does.

• Site Age – the age of a site is generally considered to be one of the top five most influential factors in how high a site ranks. While it’s something that is out of your control, sometimes you’ll see a site from 1999 consistently outranking a better site from 2006 and it’s helpful to understand why. You can see the history of a site using a nifty tool called the Wayback Machine.
• Y! Links – the number of backlinks the domain has in Yahoo. As you probably already know by now, the quantity and quality of links pointing to a site is extremely relevant in determining how high it ranks. Looking at the particular links that your competition has serves as one of the best ways to learn how they market their site. It is also one of the best ways to brainstorm potential link building ideas for your site. For example, if your competitors products are all reviewed on a popular blog in your industry, there’s a good chance that same blog would want to review your products as well (giving you free publicity and quality links).
• Pages indexed – this refers to the number of pages listed in a search engines index (also referred to as cached pages). Sites that rank high are generally easy for Google, Yahoo, and MSN to spider and thus have nearly all of their pages included in their indexes. You can check how many pages are indexed by typing in site:www.yoursite.com, or by using a tool like the Indexed Pages tool on SEOmoz. Using sitemaps is a great way to ensure that every page on your site is indexed properly.
• Last indexed – this is the date of the last time Google visited the home page of the site. Ideally your site is indexed every single day, but it usually depends on how frequently you update your content. If you update content regularly, you should be being indexed at least once per week. You can find this date by clicking the “Cached” link next to any Google search result.
• Home Page PR – this refers to Google Page Rank, a 0-10 score that Google gives to assess the value of a web page. It’s primarily determined by the quality and quantity of incoming links, and is a quick and dirty way to see how popular a page is. Since it’s a universal metric that all webmasters can quickly check, it’s often misused to assume how much traffic a site gets or how high it ranks – neither of which correlate very well with PR. For our purposes though, it’s a nice barometer to look at. It can be checked using the Google Toolbar or a site like PRChecker.
• Strongest Pages – SEOmoz has a great strongest pages tool that will list off the most important pages on a domain, based on number of links pointing to it and its current rankings. This gives you an idea of what content on their domain is causing the high rankings. Is it popular articles? Is it product pages? Whatever their strongest pages, you should take note and use those pages as guidelines for potential additions and modifications to your site.

Using the information to your advantage
Pretty quickly you’ll start to realize that all of the sites you’re analyzing have been around for a few years, are indexed frequently and thoroughly, and have a lot of quality backlinks. So how do you get there? Well there’s nothing you can do about site age, but the rest are very much in your control: you can model title tags and page headings after the competition, you can structure your site and internally link the way that they do, you can add sections related to topics that they rank high for, and you can most definitely expand your link building plan by studying what has worked for them. Ultimately, analyzing and understanding your competition will reduce your learning curve and accelerate the growth of your site.

Adapted from the Faceup Web Marketing eBook
Download it now for FREE

About a week ago I got a phone call from a college buddy of mine named Paul who runs a soon-to-launch online business. Here’s how the conversation went:

Paul: “We want to hire your company to do the SEO for us. Whatever the price is, we can afford it.”

Me: “Tell me a little more about your company and exactly what you expect to achieve from search.”

Paul: “We want to rank #1 in Google for EVERYTHING in our industry, and I know you can do it for us.”

Me: “I’d be happy to consult with your team to make sure you understand the principles of SEO and get off on the right foot, but I think you’re better off doing the work yourself.”

He was perplexed. Why wouldn’t we want to take on his SEO work? It has nothing to do with him or his company. It has everything to do with the misunderstood nature of what it takes to consistently rank high in natural search. The absolute best companies I’ve worked with make every decision with SEO in mind. Everyone in their organization – from management to programmers to marketing – is thinking about the search impact of their decisions. For that reason it makes sense to hire a consultant or to learn it yourself, but not to hire an outside firm to outsource your entire SEO campaign to.

Most of the time when companies outsource SEO they do it with the mentality of “here you go, you handle it, we expect results.” They view it as an entirely separate entity and not as a core value that needs to be instilled in their organization to be successful. That’s why outsourced SEO just doesn’t work: your organization still makes decisions the old way.

How will this programming change impact our search results? Can we build link-building into our marketing campaign? What adjustments can we make so that both are working in harmony to achieve our objectives as a company and rank as high as we can? There is no incentive to learn about search if someone else is handling it for you, and consequently you probably won’t be asking these important questions when making a critical business decision.

Paul was still a bit confused with that answer. So let’s take a closer look at some of the key components necessary for SEO success and what needs to take place for them to be accomplished:

Keyword Research – this entails researching how frequently phrases relevant to your site are searched. I like to use the SEO-Book tool or the free version of Wordtracker. Keyword research is important because it will impact your site structure, title tags (widely regarded as the most influential factor in how high you rank), and will help identify opportunities in your industry (if a term is searched a lot but there aren’t a lot of good results, you may have just identified a great expansion opportunity for your company). This is best done by either a consultant or the internal head of your SEO campaign, which should be someone in upper-management.

On-Site Optimization and Site Structure – this is what most people think of when they think of SEO. What changes should be made to your site so that search engine spiders have the best chance of crawling it, understanding the content, and ranking you accordingly. Most often, this involves changes to Title/META tags, cleaning up source code so that it’s proper HTML, moving CSS and Javascript to external files, adding sitemaps, modifying internal linking structure and anchor text, and several other standard changes that eliminate all potential crawling and indexing issues. This is best done by your programmer(s) so that they understand the importance of the changes and make them part of their routine in the future. These changes can be suggested by a consultant, but will only really be successful if programmers are on board.

Link building – this is probably the second most common task associated with SEO. By now you already know that you need one-way incoming links from relevant sites with applicable anchor text to rank high. Many outsourced SEO firms will either engage in elaborate link exchanges or purchase paid links for you: both of which are obsolete in terms of having any positive impact in your rankings, and now can potentially penalize you. The best one-way link building techniques – press releases, content syndication, blogging, product syndication, viral videos, etc – all require a LOT of input from you to be successful. Most of the time they should be integrated into your existing marketing plan to have the highest chance to thrive. For example, most companies already issue press releases when they have newsworthy announcements so it’s a natural extension to email the release to online news sites and blogs, and to use an online distribution service. I think successful link building is best done by your marketing department as part of your overall marketing strategy. It’s fine to have a consultant help put the plan together, but the actual implementation of the plan should be done by you.

Analytics – this involves the measurement and tracking of your sites’ SEO and marketing campaign. Previously, this could be tedious for small sites and I might have recommended outsourcing. But with the new version of Google Analytics, a properly configured account will tell you everything you need to know about where every single sale on your site came from. Your programmer or consultant should be able to set it up for you and configure the reports to track only the most important metrics for your organization. I also like to track incoming links and search engine rankings for a site (two things that Analytics does not track), but those can easily be tracked with the Marketleap Link Checker and Digital Point Keyword Tracker.

In the end, whether you decide to hire a consultant or tackle SEO internally with the vast information available online, you still need to make SEO part of your organizations objectives for it to be a success: something that outsourcing usually doesn’t do. At Faceup-Sites, we offer our popular Faceup Web Marketing Book so you can learn and implement SEO on your own.

Download the eBook NOW for FREE

In the past few years WordPress has become the standard blog publishing platform because of its ease of use, rich feature set, available plugins, and standards compliance. Of course, the fact that it’s free and open source hasn’t hurt either.

While developers have flocked to using WordPress as their blogging platform of choice, it’s often overlooked as a content management platform for non-blog sites. WordPress allows you to create pages that automatically are added to the sites’ navigation bar and can be customized by a PHP programmer to handle just about any task you’d want to accomplish with a site. Free themes and plugins can help reduce programming and design costs immensely, and with a little work WordPress can be customized to automate many of the most arduous SEO tasks. The result is a powerful and easy to use search engine friendly publishing platform that eliminates the majority of both upfront and ongoing SEO work.

Since WordPress is already very standards compliant, you and your programmer don’t need to worry about proper HTML formatting – that’s all taken care of for you. There are, however, a few simple steps that should be taken to turn your WordPress site into the ultimate search-optimized site:

Create Unique Title Tags
Search Engine Optimization firm SEOmoz recently polled 37 of the best SEO’s about what factors influence Google’s algorithm. The NUMBER ONE factor influencing a high ranking was “Keyword Use in Title Tag”. For that reason alone you want your Title Tag to include the most relevant keywords related to your post. Unfortunately WordPress defaults to having your site title as the first thing in your Title Tag. Ideally you’d have a customizable page title show up first.

For example, if your company named Cool Designs is located in New York and has a Web Design page, the Title Tag “New York City Web Design – Cool Designs” is more likely to rank high for NYC-related web design queries than a page that has “Cool Designs – Web Design” as the Title Tag. Fortunately WordPress has a SEO Title Tag plugin that allows you to customize each Title Tag.

Turn on Permalinks
The default WordPress post or page has a permanent link that looks like http://www.yoursite.com/?p=123. This is what’s called a dynamic URL - a URL that uses variables in the URL to determine the page content. In this case the “p” variable determines what is shown when the page is loaded. And while dynamic URLs are efficient for programming, they aren’t exactly search engine or user friendly.

Years ago search engines had trouble indexing dynamic URLs. That’s not necessarily the case anymore (although you might as well remove all doubt), but static URLs like http://www.yoursite.com/keyword-filled-post-title/ still offer several advantages. The primary advantage is the cleanliness of the URL, which really has nothing at all to do with search rankings. A URL with real words in it (as opposed to numbers and question marks) is much more enticing for people to click on when search results are returned, and consequently is much easier for them to remember when re-visiting your site. Having relevant keywords from your post in your URL can also have a slight impact in boosting your rankings for those key words.

This change can be done with URL rewriting. Normally doing this requires quite a bit of programming effort. Not with WordPress. Just go to Options  Permalinks and change your default structure to the date and name based structure.

Create Sitemaps
Both HTML sitemaps (a page that lists links to every other page on your site) and XML sitemaps (a file that lists all of the pages on your site for search engine spiders) can aid immensely in getting every page on your site indexed by all of the search engines. Automating each type of sitemap usually requires a few hours of programming for most sites. Of course, WordPress has a HTML sitemap plugin and a XML sitemap plugin that does all of the work for you. After creating the XML sitemap, be sure to submit it to Google and Yahoo to access extensive crawling information about your site.

Install Analytics
All of the traffic in the world isn’t worth very much if you aren’t converting any of it to sales, leads, newsletter signups, or whatever the goal of your site may be. Google Analytics has become the premiere analytics software because of its simple and customizable interface, breadth of features, and price (free). In addition to the normal important analytics metrics – visitors, unique visitors, page views, new/returning visitors, traffic sources, most viewed content, etc – Google Analytics has goal tracking and e-commerce revenue tracking so you can see exactly where each conversion is coming from. After signing up for an account, the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress will have you up and running in minutes.

If you also use WordPress for its blogging capabilities, you’ll want to install the Sociable plugin and sign up for a Feedburner account to make sure you get the most out of your blog. Sociable allows people to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Technorati, reddit, and StumbleUpon, which can be VERY effective for promoting extremely viral sites and articles. Feedburner offers a plethora of advancements to your RSS feed for your posts, but from a SEO standpoint the most important thing is to configure it to automatically ping search engines and blog directories. This ensures that your posts always get indexed, and usually gets them indexed fast.

There you have it – a perfectly optimized site using WordPress and other free tools in about a hundredth of the time it would take you if you built it from scratch. At Faceup we offer WordPress sites starting at $249!