How to Conduct Competitive Research - Keyword Choices, Inbound Links
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Keyword Choices and Density – You should know what your core keywords are before you decide which sites you will tackle for competition on these keywords. A good way to do this is to use a program that will literally extract all of the words from your web page, and choose your keywords from the resulting list. You should choose words and phrases that not only relate to the overall theme of the page, but also words and phrases that appear continuously and consistently.
If you are looking at increasing your keyword density, you can substitute your keywords into existing words and phrases within your content. For example, if my core keyword is “search engine optimization,” I can substitute “SEO” or “a project” with “search engine optimization.” Ideal keyword density varies per search engine, so it’s best to average them among the top three: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. To make it more complicated, it appears that keyword densities also vary depending upon what the keyword actually is!
Because of this, it’s difficult to give you a set number for your density percentage. TIP: If you don’t know what your keyword density should be, all you need to do is look at the sites in the top ten of your keywords, run the extraction tool on that site or page, then find the average density of your competitors by first dividing the number of keywords by the total number of words on the page, then average that among the top ten sites. Then you’ll need to go one step further and do this for the other two search engines, and once you’re done there, you should average them all together. Make sure you don’t go into overdrive: over-optimizing keyword density can work against you, and can appear as spammy results to a search engine.
Inbound Links – The higher your inbound link count, the better your chances are of reaching the top of the SERPs. If you look at the top ten sites for your core keywords, you’ll see that most of them have many inbound links. Even more specifically, they will have many QUALITY inbound links, not just sheer numbers of them. It’s really the quality of those links that count more than the amount. If you use Firefox, you can download and install a browser plug-in called SEO Open, which with a click of a button on your tool bar can check for backlink counts in Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, and has other tools that are very useful for SEO.
If you don’t have Firefox, you can always find a different tool, or check the inbound links manually by typing into your browser address bar: link:www.site.com for Google, Yahoo and MSN, or site backlinks with linkdomain:www.site.com for Yahoo and MSN. There are many tools available to do this for you; just do a search for backlink tools.
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