How can you possibly hope to challenge your business rivals in terms of search engine rankings without an intimate knowledge of the reasons behind their successes? To perform SEO in a vacuum is to declaw your ultimate organic visibility potential. Don’t just focus on your own website and whether or not you can prevail for your most valuable keywords. Look specifically at what the competitors you can’t eclipse are doing, and then formulate a plan for supplementing your efforts based on that analysis.

Here is the good news: The reasons behind the enviable rankings of your foes are always readily visible. Save for the intricate inner-workings of search engine algorithms, there are very few secrets in the wild world of search engine optimization. Here is what to look for first and why:

1. Title Tags: View source of the competition’s pages and dissect their Title tags.
   Why?: Title tags are weighed heavily by all search engines and should be among your first optimization targets. Are your MVKs in your title tags? Are your title tags unique to every page? Is your domain name taking up half of the valuable character limit in your tag? Treat your Title tags with the respect they deserve, and you can start by learning from those of your nemesis. >> Title Tag Tips.

1. Meta Tags: View source of your competition’s pages and dissect their keyword and description metas.
   Why?: Chances are, if they have an intelligent SEO effort underway, you’ll be able to snatch a few keywords or ideas you hadn’t thought of. Allow their tags to influence your own, but do not blatantly copy them. Search engines (and corporate lawyers) will appreciate unique copy. >> Meta Tag Analyzer.

1. Back/Incoming Links: Who is linking to your competitor’s site?Why?: Simply put - the more indexed incoming links a site has, the better they will do in natural search. An incoming link counts as a ‘vote’ for your site. How prominent are the linking sites and how many of them are using mission-critical keywords in the anchor text? >> Backlink & Anchor Text Tool.

These starting points are the tip of the iceberg, but among the most important to any comprehensive SEO competitive analysis. Keep your eye on the surrounding landscape, and not just your own domain. Don’t do it to keep the wolves at bay, but rather to learn from the very easily figured strategies of others.

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I love Saturday Night Live, and I always hang in there during the (frequent) rebuilding years. There was a skit last weekend about a Monster in a little girl’s closet. Long story short, not only did her parents believe her and immediately become hysterical - eventually the suave monster came out of her closet and began singing “Here Comes Santa Claus”. It was twisted, the best skit of the night and also kinda timely given this recent report.

Every time I discuss SEM in open company, or meet a new PPC client for the first time, the discussion invariably turns to the horrors of click fraud. You’ve no doubt heard the ghost stories about the insipid teams of people in Prague and India who are paid by your competitors to do nothing except click your PPC ads all day and kill puppies. This poppycock has dangerously passed into the realm of truth for most peripheral online marketers, and it’s time to put this Boogeyman to bed.

Andy Beal’s scoop from Search Engine Strategies is straight from the Googleplex, so have a read and learn about the impressive security measures in place within AdWords. 4 levels of security, to be exact. Simply put, actual click fraud within AdWords totals less than 2%:

“This is an amazing revelation and clearly shows that Google is getting tired of speculation and rumor filling the void left by the lack of transparency Google has with regards to their click fraud numbers… The biggest reason Google has for being hesitant about revealing the exact numbers, is fear that Yahoo and Microsoft will be able to leverage the numbers to deduce more information about AdWords.”

I am putting a lot of my faith in these numbers - admittedly mainly because they reinforce what I’ve always believed. At the least this level of security should appease some of the skeptics. PPC, when done correctly, can be such an effective traffic and revenue generator that it should never be discounted because of what equates now to little more than an urban myth. Boo!

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