With the manual approach, you run all the keywords on your keyword list through at
least two of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, or Bing). Of course, not all of
the search results will be those of your direct competitors. You will need to browse and
research these sites to make that determination.
You might need to browse through several SERPs to get to your competition. If you
do, this may mean the keywords you are targeting may not be good. If you find no
competitor sites, you may have hit the right niche.
While going through your keyword list, analyze each competitor while finding any new
keywords you may have missed. For each competitor URL, run Google’s related:
command to find any additional competitors you may have missed. Repeat this process
until you have run out of keywords.
Analyze your competitors’ sites using the information we already discussed regarding
internal and external ranking factors. When analyzing each competitor site, pay attention
to each search result and to the use of keywords within each result. Expand your
research by browsing and analyzing your competitor’s site.
You can determine the kind of competitor you have just by doing some basic inspections.
For starters, you may want to know whether they are using SEO. Inspect their
HTML header tags for keywords and description meta tags, as these can be indications
of a site using SEO.
Although the use of meta keyword tags is subsiding, many sites still use them, as they
may have done their SEO a long time ago when meta keyword tags mattered. The meta
description tag is important, though, as it appears on search engine search results. The
same can be said of the HTML <title> tag. Examine those carefully.
Continue by inspecting the existence or the lack of a robots.txt file. If the file exists, this
could indicate that your competitor cares about web spiders. If your competitor is using
a robots.txt file, see whether it contains Sitemap file definition.
least two of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, or Bing). Of course, not all of
the search results will be those of your direct competitors. You will need to browse and
research these sites to make that determination.
You might need to browse through several SERPs to get to your competition. If you
do, this may mean the keywords you are targeting may not be good. If you find no
competitor sites, you may have hit the right niche.
While going through your keyword list, analyze each competitor while finding any new
keywords you may have missed. For each competitor URL, run Google’s related:
command to find any additional competitors you may have missed. Repeat this process
until you have run out of keywords.
Analyze your competitors’ sites using the information we already discussed regarding
internal and external ranking factors. When analyzing each competitor site, pay attention
to each search result and to the use of keywords within each result. Expand your
research by browsing and analyzing your competitor’s site.
You can determine the kind of competitor you have just by doing some basic inspections.
For starters, you may want to know whether they are using SEO. Inspect their
HTML header tags for keywords and description meta tags, as these can be indications
of a site using SEO.
Although the use of meta keyword tags is subsiding, many sites still use them, as they
may have done their SEO a long time ago when meta keyword tags mattered. The meta
description tag is important, though, as it appears on search engine search results. The
same can be said of the HTML <title> tag. Examine those carefully.
Continue by inspecting the existence or the lack of a robots.txt file. If the file exists, this
could indicate that your competitor cares about web spiders. If your competitor is using
a robots.txt file, see whether it contains Sitemap file definition.