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The competitor analysis I refer to here is not to be confused with the Competitive Analysis applied to a business to determine a unique selling proposition or a Competitive Advantage.

The competitor analysis to which I refer is that which when applied to a web site makes it possible to determine what improvements are necessary to a web page and web site in order to compete with competitors holding a place in the Top 10 Search Engine Results.

Anyone who has a web site quickly discovers that unless they have a listing on the first page of search results for a particular search term, they stand little chance of getting any significant free traffic from a search engine.

Competitor Analysis when applied to a web page means that you can establish how much to optimize a page in order to compete against the top 10 competitors for the keywords that have been targeted.

It also means not wasting time overly optimizing pages that don't need to be and avoiding an over optimization penalty that can be applied by a search engine, resulting in a worsening, not an improvement in ranking.

Competitor analysis compares a web page against each of the 10 competitors pages in the top search engine rankings for many 10s of important ranking factors. It can advise what the page doesnt have, what it has too much of and suggests what can be changed to improve ranking.

Competitor Analysis On-Page Factors
A typical competitor analysis looks at Keyword Quantity, Keyword Density, Keyword Prominence and the Number of Words & Characters in each of the following areas:

Page Title, Meta Keywords, Meta Description, Body Text Overall, Body Text - First Sentence, Page URL, H1 & H2 Headline Texts, On Page Link Texts, Outbound Link Texts, On Page URLs, Outbound Link URLs, Image ALT Tags and HTML Comment Tags.

Competitor analysis is also not constrained to just factors on a web page, but can also be used to assess off-page factors.

Competitor Analysis Off-Page Factors
Links to a site are now more important that ever in determining whether a top 10 search engine ranking can be achieved. A typical off-page competitor analysis will therefore consider each of the following:

Total Incoming Page Links
Keywords in link URL's
Keywords in Link Texts
Other terms used in links
.edu links
.gov links
DMOZ links
Yahoo Directory Listings
Deep Link Ratio
Site Age

From all this analysis it is possible to establish what factors are likely to have placed the analysed web pages in the Top 10 search results and what is required in order to compete with them and gain a top 10 ranking.

The analysis may also include an assessment of the keywords used by a competitor determined from the page content. Keywords in the keyword meta tags are not used because they are unreliable for determining what keywords a competitor is actually using.

Competitive analysis provides a lot of data with which to make a decision on what is required to compete with competitor web pages holding a top 10 ranking.

However, what should not be overlooked is whether the time, resources and knowledge is available to compete with those sites already holding a top 10 ranking.

It may be more cost effective in terms of time, effort and resources to compete initially for a keyword phrase that has less competition and against web sites not so well entrenched in the Top 10 search results.

Andy Theekson is the SEO specialist at the search-engine-optimizer.com providing advice and services to small and medium sized web businesses on web design and search engine marketing. Further details on applying Competitor Analysis and example reports can be found in Competitor Analysis - Beating the Competition.