Competitor Analysis
Competitor anlaysis is important because it tells you what you have to do to knock the top ten sites off of page one. We will perform competitor analysis on your top ten selected keywords and for the top ten sites ranking for those keywords. We will report on the following elements;
Domain Age
Quite simply, this number represents how old the domain is. Generally, the older the better in terms of how Google will look at your site. Rightly or wrongly, they see an old domain as having more authority over a new domain as it has been around longer and has stood the test of time.
Page Rank
Page rank is the rating out of 10 that Google gives each page of your site. Not as important as it used to be, generally you get a good page rank over time and it is judged on how many backlinks your site has, the quality of backlinks your site has, and how much traffic it gets etc. Sites like ebay.com have a page rank of 8 out of 10. You want to get this number as high as you can, which is why it's important to keep getting those one-way backlinks to your site from as many different sources as you can.
Google Index Count
This number refers to the number of pages on your website that Google has indexed. Google is constantly crawling the Internet to find fresh new pages to add to their huge database or index of sites and pages. Needless to say, you want Google to have a listing in their index for every page on your website - a page that is not indexed will never appear in the search results. Therefore it is important to keep your website fresh by constantly adding new pages for Google to find and index.
External Backlinks
This is an estimate of the number of backlinks your site has on the selected page. Backlinks are the most important feature of your site that Google looks at when determining how high to rank your pages. But it's not as simple as the page with the most backlinks wins; Google looks at the strength of those links too and to some degree how relevant they are. It also matters what page rank a site has that is linking to you, obviously a link from a site that has a page rank of 6 is worth a lot more in Google's eyes than a link from a site with a page rank of 2. Similarly, you don't want all your links to come from sites that have just high page ranks as Google knows this is not natural.
External Domain Backlinks
Domain backlinks are the same as the above but instead of linking to specific pages on your site these links go directly to your home page. Obviously, if the majority of your links are just going to your home page, then this doesn't look natural to Google. So you want most of your links to point towards your individual internal pages, these are called internal links.
Page .edu/.gov Backlinks
This refers to how many backlinks your site has from .edu and .gov websites. Why is this important? Google tends to give these kinds of backlinks more weight as they are genuinely harder to obtain.
DMOZ Directory
This is a directory of websites that is monitored by humans. In order for your site to be listed in the DMOZ directory your site must pass some very strict criteria. The waiting list to join the DMOZ directory is also pretty long. This is why Google takes a lot of notice of a site that is listed in the DMOZ directory. Although recent tests suggest to us that the DMOZ directory isn't quite as authoritative in the eyes of Google as it was a few years back.
Yahoo Directory
The Yahoo directory is monitored by humans but you can actually buy your way into the Yahoo directory - but it will cost you.
And even then there's no guarantee that Yahoo will accept your site. Over the years, due to certain misuse, Google doesn't rate a Yahoo directory listing quite as high as it used to.
Keyword in Title
This refers to whether the keyword you are trying to rank highly for in Google is actually in the title tags in your website code. Again, not as effective as it used to be - but still one of those quick things that is worth doing.
Keyword in URL
This refers to whether the keyword you are trying to rank highly for in Google is actually in the URL of the page you are trying to rank (e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/keyword1.html).
Keyword in Description
This refers to whether the keyword you are trying to rank highly for in Google is actually in the description tags in your website code. Again, not as effective as it used to be - but still one of those quick things that is worth doing.
Keyword in Header Tags
This refers to whether the keyword you are trying to rank highly for in Google is actually in the header tags in your website code. Again, not as effective as it used to be - but still one of those quick things that is worth doing.
Google Cache Age
This is a very important date as it shows the last time that Google came along with its spiders and indexed the site. If you have a site that just sits there month after month not growing or changing in any way then Google will eventually start to ignore it. You don't want that - you want the Google spiders coming to your site every day if possible. The only way to do this is to keep adding content like articles, videos, blog posts etc. to your site as often as possible.
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