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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If you’re focusing 100% of your SEO time on catering to Google’s royal highness - frankly no one is really going to blame you. But as Google, Yahoo and MSN compete aggressively for search market share, they also strive to differentiate themselves from eachother. One of the ways in which they do this is by having their algorithms interpret sites in alternate ways. So if you want an SEO strategy that is going to be truly comprehensive, you should be aware of what the red headed stepspiders are looking for when they visit your site, too.

So what do we know about the different ways the top 3 assign natural ranking? Nutshell:

• Google has many fancies but definitely loves incoming links.
• Yahoo loves keyword-dense content sites.
• MSN loves internal linking and inbound links.

That’s way oversimplified, I know. Spare me. Of the three MSN/Windows Live seems to be the least considered or talked about, so let’s dig a little deeper. I already mentioned internal linking structure, and that topic is worthy of its own future post. Quickly, it means that you link to pages within your own site using targeted keywords. Sort of like a mini sitemap on every page, but with very specific iteration choices in the link text (see what I just did there?).

And we all probably know what a one-way, incoming link is by now. So what else differentiates MSN from the competition? Some SEO companies will tell you that meta tag importance has gone the way of the DoDo. Others will tell you that meta optimization is part of any comprehensive SEO effort. The former is true if you only care about Google, as their algorithm largely ignores meta data. But MSN holds meta data in very high regard - so the latter is also true. MSN is a true meta search engine, so this area should not be overlooked or considered a throwback based on what Google’s algorithm happens to be doing.

Other MSN idiosyncrasies include a dislike of nested tables (another reason to start using CSS) and a more liberal stance on keyword density levels before they are considered spam. But the real point to take away from this article is that the meta tag is not dead. And remember - With Gates and Microsoft behind Windows Live, there is no such thing as a development or marketing ceiling for this product. They should be taken very seriously by internet marketers, as not even The Shadow knows what’s going to happen to market share percentages in the next couple of years. Because I think Microsoft just bought him.

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