Checking Out Your Competition!
In almost any field, there is always competition. Even on the net, we are all competing for the search engine user to click on our link rather than our competitors. One of the best ways to get a higher search engine ranking/pagerank is to learn from your competitors how they managed to a high ranking. There a few ways to do that:
1. Check your competitor's backlinks and try to get them for your own!
There are a few free tools online which allows you to search for backlinks from a few search engines, but we can just use Google's command:
to find the backlinks. Check the websites which were listed and see if you can get a link from them (could be a link directory, blog aggregator, etc). And you need to note that, the higher the pagerank of these links, the more valuable the link is.
2. Decipher your competitor's source code
On your browser, right click on your competitor's webpage and click on View Source. Look out for their meta keywords. They should look like these:
Now, some people pay alot or spend alot of time to gain information for knowing which keywords are the best, etc and now you just got them free from your competitor! But should you use these as your own meta keywords?
There are split views on this but alot of search engine optimisers think that meta keywords do not do much to your search engine ranking, in fact Googlebots are known to just skip it and although Yahoo acknowledges it, it will not do much to your ranking. So, how should you implement these in your site?
The best way is to integrate them into your article headings and article so search engine bots can detect it. By consciously including these keywords into your article, you stand to gain a higher search engine ranking than your competitor.
3. Learn how your competitor categorises their articles/content
Categories tell alot to both users and searchbots because they are what the authors consider important or general enough to create content for. Also, by having rightly worded categories which fits well with the keywords, this will work wonders for your permalinks!
