It’s free.  It’s fun.  It’s easy.

One of the fastest and easiest ways to determine how to get your site ranked, is to do a little down-n-dirty research about what your competition is doing to SEO their sites.

Before we go any further, you should know what keywords you are trying to rank for.  If you haven’t already, you should read the post on Keyword Research now.

Once you have your keywords that’ll be the basis of your SEO effort, you’ll want to discover who’s making it to the top 5 positions of the Google results page for each of those keywords.

What makes them so special in Google’s eyes?  How the heck did they achieve top ranking?  What will you have to do to move your site up ahead of theirs?

Discovering the answers to these questions gives us a good sense of what we need to do moving forward.

When I’m looking to build some free backlinks to my site, I’ll often start with digging into the backlinks from the top broker in town…. and then seeing what I have to do to get links from the same place.  Check their inlinks with Yahoo linkdomain command - see Benchmarking Your Site .

What other keywords are they optimizing for?  Might those be keywords we want to rank for too?   There are a number of tools you might want to use here.  KeywordSpy will tell you what keywords they’re ranking for, and what keywords they’re advertising on.  Another tool (I forget which one it is now, but I’ll post it here when I remember) will tell you what keywords the site is optimized for.  If you run this tool on both their site and yours, you might get a little insight.

Do they have some on-page SEO that we missed?  If you do a View…Source from your browser while you’re on their site, you can find the kind of on-page SEO they’re doing.  (See my post on On-Page SEO for more specifics).  If you’re not sure what kind of stuff to put in your own title tags and meta-data, you might get some hints from theirs.  Chances are, they’ve paid a SEO pro to get them top rankings.  No sense all that hard-earned money going to waste!

(more later)