How to analyze a competitors site?

I have been stuck with a few keywords in the 12th and 11th positions for awhile now. I keep building links, but dos'nt seem to help much at this time.
I realize now that I have caught up with my real competitors and I'm going to need to step it up a notch.

I did the allintitle to see who I was competing with and almost all of the ones that come up before me are the same competitors that rank better for with just the search.

Can anyone tell me a few ideas on how to analyze their site, so I can see what changes that I can do to out rank them?

Thanks for your help.

 

You can analyze your competitors site by viewing their backlinks....

Analyze who they are linking too....

 

Thanks thunderbolt, I have done some of that, and it looks like most of their backlinks are from Banner Ads, and directories. They all do have more links than I do, however they do not have goo anchor text in their links. Almost all of them just have the sites domain name.

 

try "seoQuake" or "seo for firefox" extensions for fast results, for deeper analysis I personally suggest doing a manual analysis of your top competitors.

 

Make sure when it comes to your backlinks that the anchor text is excatly what you want your main keywords to be.

Example..

If your main goal is to be in the top #10 for funny pictures, you would use funny pictures as your anchor text. This helps greatly.

 

Check for the no. of their links
The keywords they use
The keywords on anchor text
The content

 

I'd go threw the top 100 links in all your competitors and find out where all of them are linking from each other. Most of the time, they'll be a few places where 2/3/4 of them will have a link from the same place. You want your link there too.

Make sure you don't oversaturate your anchor text backlinks. Spice it up a little bit. If your anchor text is "Small Green Widgets" try: "Large Green Widgets" or "Small Blue Widgets". Keep the engines on-topic, but make it look natural.

Lastly, go threw the top 100 listings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN for your main keywords and see if you can get a link on every single one of those pages. If you have to purchase a link, so be it. If its a blog, comment on it. If its a forum, make a new post. Make your backlinks look unnatural and your rankings will follow suit.

 

How do I know if I have oversaturated? I have been going after "towables pretty hard, also "towable tubes"

Most of the top 100 are competitors. Mostly all ecommerce.

 

analyzing backlink is the key. but unfortunately there isn't any available free seo tools that i know of could give us the data needed. you can only do that by buying good seo software. so if you have money and really serious about your biz i suggest you better buy one.

 

Does anyone recommend any software for this?

 

give us your URL and the keyword you are going for...

 

Right now I'm still working on "Towables" that goes to the site that is on my signature. I was in position 9 not that long ago, but I have fallen to around 15 currently. Not sure whay I dropped.

I am also trying hard to get to the top with "Towable Tubes" going to this link:
http://www.premiumpowersports.com/All-Towable-Tubes-p-1-c-5.html
I have not hit the 1st page yet. I seem to be stuck around 12th position.

Those are my top two that I would like to get to the top before I start going for "Boating Supplies" I imagine boating supplies is going to be harder than "Towables". And I'm not doing so well with "Towables" and "Towables Tubes"...lol

 

You might want to reconsider your home pages description and work a little on your internal linking.

 

Thanks trapped but I'm not sure what you mean by this. Like I mentioned earlier, I dont know very much at all about on-site optimization. Can you give me an example.

Thanks for your help.

 

Click on seo report in my sig, that will analyze your competitor sites against yours, easy really!

 

You can use this tool to check backlinks...

http://backlinkwatch.com/index.php

I don't know if anyone else suggested it, but another trick is to start your own blog and write some articles that are about your boating topic and make sure you use the keywords you're going after in the text of the article. Then submit them to Digg, Technorati, Delicious, etc. These articles should get listed in the search engines quickly for those keywords, and when people visit the article, they can click on the links you've created. Just another way to get links to your site and increase exposure.

 

Hey Kraven,

I'll suggest you a tool. Please check www.xinureturns.com.

Here you put in any site and it gives you all the detailed info about that site. Just check your competitor's site here and you'll come to know what have they done and simply replicate it you shall see amazing results.

Apart from the offpage thing, I think you should also look if you've missed something onpage. That may be anything from improvement in Anchor text, alt tags, keyword density, keyword proximity, anything.

One more suggestion from me would be create a blog on your website as a subdomain. Due to which you will get fresh content on your website each day which google really likes. There are chances that you may end up comin on top5 if you just try doing these things...

Cheers..

 

Get IBP! Best investment you'll ever make re analyzing your competitors not just the few angles above but get a direct comparison report/action steps.

 

What about Web CEO, I use that for analysing competition. I have never used IBP, would you say it is better than web ceo?

 

To rank that page better for towables here's whati would reccomend:

Change title tag so that keyword is the first word
For the heading on the page, use an H1 tag not a span tag with a font size of 14
Minimize the internal links on each page. You have a ton of links on the left side - which diminishes the value of each link. Consolidate those links so that you have fewer. Of course make certain that the link to page you are trying to rank higher remains.
Add meta tags for description and keywords (with keyword included)

Outside of that, I think the only thing left is to get more IBLs