Initial Preparation
First, figure out what you’re up agains’t. Like any marketing or business plan, do a competitive analysis for keywords. Once you know how to organize your keywords according to the competition, it narrows down your selections and saves you time. Find you top ten competitors and what their keywords are.
When working out your competitive analysis, follow these steps:
1.Number of links
Figure out how many incoming links your competitors have. There are tons of free tools to accomplish it, including Google’s toolbar, or several other SEO addons for Firefox. You can also search google “link:http://yoursitehere.com/” to see how it indexes links back to your site. Also, add your website to Google Webmaster Tools. Build a list of the incoming links for the competition and see how that compares to your site.
2.Quality of the links
Now that you have a list of incoming links, it’s time to check the quality. Open Site Explorer can do this for you in a flash (account required). Or try Yahoo’s site explorer It’s more important the quality than the quantity, so if you’re paying someone to add your links to low quality directories and links farms, be ready to drop down a bit.
3.Keywords as anchor text
4.Indexed pages
Make sure that all your pages are indexed. You can do this online using sitemap generation tools, or in WordPress using sitemap xml generator. Check to make sure that all your pages are indexed, and if not, optimize and make sure the links are included in your sitemap.
5.Avoid duplicate content
Never duplicate your information, posts, pages, and keep the structure sound. Don’t redirect links that don’t serve a purpose, and make sure that all your content is not duplicated on another page.
Make sure you dive into competitive analysis before you get too far into researching traffic flow and keyword density. Those steps should help alleviate