Before starting your SEO strategy, it is important to first know who your online competitors are and what kind of online marketing tactics they are already engaging in. You will want to take some time to research and analyze your competitors to gain intelligence and hopefully stay one step ahead of them.

Here are some guidelines and questions to consider while performing research on the Internet about your competitors:

Website Design and Layout

Are your competitors using a search engine friendly Web design, like a basic HTML or ASP site?

• Are they using JavaScript, a dynamically-driven site, frames, or tables that will prevent search engines from properly indexing their sites?

• Are any Web sites built entirely in flash?

• Are their sites easy to navigate with a professional look and feel by using the same font styles and sizes and similar color schemes throughout?

• How heavily are the graphics on the Web site?

• How many Web pages total does each of your competitors have on their site? Does your site need improvement on the amount of content-rich Web pages you have?

• Does the entire Web site focus on one central theme alone?

Placement of Keywords

• Where are your competitors using their chosen keywords? The META title tag? The META description tag? The META keywords tag? In ALT tags? What about in link text and headline tags? The page URL? Image names?

• How often do those keywords appear on each Web page?

• Where does each of their keywords first appear on the pages of each of your competitors sites?

• Are they achieving good rankings for their chosen keywords online in Google, MSN and Yahoo!?

• What is the keyword weight and density of the entire content of your competitors’ pages? Are they keyword spamming?

• What are their chosen keywords being targeted on their sites? Are they single words or long-tail keywords with 3, 4 or even 5 keyword phrases?

Off Page Factors

• Check your competitors Alexa.com and Compete.com traffic rank and compare with yours. Do they receive more or less Web traffic to their sites?

• What is their Google PageRank? Again, is it higher or lower than yours?

• Go to a reputable link popularity checker online and compare the number of incoming links your site has versus your competitors. How much improvement in link building, if any, does your site need to effectively compete online?

• What types of incoming links are they receiving, how top quality are these links, and how much traffic does a link from these sites generate for your competitors each month?

• Are any of your competitors registered with any popular link directories, like dmoz.org, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com or other similar high traffic directories online?

• Do they have a sign up box for an industry email newsletter on their sites?

Use of Spamming Techniques

• Is the competitor’s site using any spam or unethical search engine practices? If so, what are they?

• Do any of these sites have doorway or gateway pages?

• Do they have same color text on a same color background?

• Are they blatantly keyword spamming?

• Are these sites publicly listed or affiliated with gambling or adult-oriented sites?

Yes, these are basics for you advanced guys out there, but take a look at this list again and think of the couple of tactics you don’t look at on a regular basis. Ah, yes we may have studied all of these tactics but not using them regularly may give missed opportunities in the long run.

Google has made a slew of improvements within his past week such as including banner ads in search results and reading dynamic URL’s as reported last week.

One of the most important technical tools any SEO should use is the free Google Webmaster tools. This gives you a great deal of performance data to ensure Google is properly crawling and indexing your site. For those of you already familiar with the tool, you may have noticed a few improvements within the last day or so. The UI has been tweaked a bit but I noticed they removed the “date last crawled” feature in the overview section. This feature is critical to make sure Googlebot is visiting the site as often as possible. If a site hasn’t been crawled in a few weeks, changes can be made for the spiders to revisit but without knowing, myself and everyone else out there is in the dark.

That’s the downside to this update. As for the improvements, you can now use the tool to set a geographic location. Basically what this means is you can use the target tool to provide Google with information that will help determine how your site appears in Google’s country-specific search results, and also improves the search results for geographic queries. This is beneficial because once Google starts to understand your target audience, it can potentially optimize results to ensure you are reaching your intended audience. For instance I’m from a small town outside of Buffalo, NY called Angola. Well, there is a country called Angola as well which is a big geographical difference. If I create a site and all the info on the site just says, “Angola” including titles tags, meta info etc, Google is confused as to where I intent to target. Not to mention, there are most likely other Angola’s in the US. If someone goes to Google as types in “Angola” there could be numerous results in there. If I go into Webmaster tools and specify my geo-targeted location as Angola, NY, it will now that’s where my audience is. My take on this, is that it is very similar to the Adwords PPC side of things. Very similar but it’s bringing you geo-qualified traffic for free!

A few other additions are and updated to their GData API. This is for high-level programmers who can use the API key to create custom reporting functions across multiple clients. Great for an agency but again, a experience programmer is required!
Google Webmasters Blog highlights everything with a few explanations.

Content is still king. Optimize your online content helps to see a significant increase in traffic and conversions as a result of improved organic search rankings. And if you’re a btob company or invested in building a brand, a simple but often overlooked way to increase your keyword rankings is to optimize the content of your email newsletter.

If you follow current best practices, you’re already posting your full newsletter articles to your site, where recipients will click through to read them, along with other content, over the few days following distribution of the e-newsletter. These posted, optimized articles will continue to generate significant traffic for years as a result of organic searches.

So, how to get started? Think about important keywords, phrases and crosslinks that would help with SEO and develop the newsletter content and article titles around them. Initially, this can feel a bit challenging as you try to balance using action words used to get readers to open your email or click a link and optimizing headlines that target specific keyword phrases.

Consider these tips, too:

Use a teaser and optimize your titles and headlines for keywords Use motivating subject lines, titles and one to two paragraph “teasers” in the e-mail to motivate readers to click through to a Web site version optimized with keywords in subheads or secondary titles following a colon or dash.

Review your e-mail clickthrough rates, Web analytics and internal search data to determine topics and keywords for future articles.

Target second- and third-tier keywords Optimize articles and pages specifically written around less competitive but important phrases to return a higher ranking.

Break up the newsletter Always post and optimize a complete Web version of your newsletter, but also divide it up by placing all of the articles, tips and other content individually on the site in a resource center or similar area.

Follow SEO basics Optimize article URLs, title tags and links to reflect your targeted keywords. Incorporate crosslinks to related articles on your site, and link previous articles and newsletters to your freshly posted content.

Ok, so I know there are a ton of SEO Blogs out there but I wanted to finally get my own off the ground and offer my two cents in the world of search engine optimization. If you want to learn more about my experience and enthusiasm towards online marketing, read the about me area.