Keyword research and ad campaigns A competitive analysis always begins with keyword research. "Search for your most obvious terms, including your brands and trademarks on the search engines," said Cam Balzer, Director of Search Strategy at Performics. "If you see your competitors consistently showing up in both natural and pay-per-click (PPC) search results, you know you are dealing with search-savvy competitors." "PPC ads tell you what terms are important to your competition," said Allan Dick, General Manager of Vintage Tub and Bath. Based on this keyword research, Balzer recommended building a matrix of both keywords and competitors. "With PPC campaigns, you can estimate your competitors' spend," he said. "You can view current cost-per-clicks from Overture's search interface, and you can calculate total costs based on the number of estimated searches per month, and estimated CTR baselines (5% for position one, 3% for position two, 1% for position three)." "If the competition is aggressively bidding for the first position, it may make sense to manage against positions two and three and also managing against acquisition metrics," advised David Williams, Chief Strategist and Co-Founder of 360i.

Search engine optimization campaigns Monitoring search engine ads are not the only way to gather competitive information. Natural search results can also provide information about link development strategies and keyword research. "With natural search results, you can extract keywords from the titles, meta tags, headings, etc. on your competitors' actual Web pages," said Balzer. Allan Dick uses natural search results to determine distributor information, manufacturing contacts, newspaper/magazine articles, and the marketing firms competitors use. For example, if you want to find your competitors' distributors, search for the manufacturer name and product name in a title, using Google's advanced search page. Dick also uses eBay for competitive research. "Using your top keywords, search through the listings and find up-and-coming sellers, new product offerings, and different product terms," he said. "Take a look at your competitor's feedback for useful information." In addition, many newspaper and magazine articles appear in reverse link look-ups, indicating your competitors' PR campaign strategies. "Look at the anchor text of some of the links," said Williams. "If the competitor has more links with anchor text that includes the targeted terms, then the site is much more likely to rank for the targeted terms." Search engines offer a plethora of information about your own site and your competitors' sites, ranging from advertising, SEO, to publicity campaigns. Understanding how to search and diligently monitoring search results often provides valuable information about the players in your industry.

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The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters and SEOs achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms.

Keyword density is important because search engines use this information to categorize a site's theme, and to determine which terms the site is relevant to. The perfect keyword density will help achieve higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for “keyword spamming”).

This tool will analyze your chosen URL and return a table of keyword density values for one-, two-, or three-word key terms. In an attempt to mimic the function of search engine spiders, it will filter out common stop words (since these will probably be ignored by search engines). It will avoid filtering out stop words in the middle of a term, however (for example: “designing with CSS” would go through, even though “with” is a stop word).

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What's the best way to get vital decision-making information about what actually converts your website visitors into customers?

A reliable web statistics toolkit can help you gauge success by telling you: Referrals - Where people found your site, such as links from other websites, search engines and keyword phrases, online ads, bookmarks, etc.

Visitors - The number of people who visited your site during a specified period - and not just "hits." Some stat tools call this "sessions."

Pages - Shows which pages of your site visitors clicked through, from the page entered to the page exited. Also called "paths."

Time on Site - Measures the length of time visitors stayed on your site. Visits that last 20 seconds or more is what you want, since most customers spend longer amounts of time in order to check out products.

Downloads - The number of times your white papers, videos, podcasts, trial software, etc. has been downloaded.

What other marketing collateral allows you to see this kind of data? None! Analyzing your web stats on a regular, ongoing basis is the only accurate way to track how you're doing against your strategic marketing objectives; it then allows for knowledgeable testing and modifying marketing campaigns, as well as efficiently allocating your investment dollars.

Some key performance indicators:

Conversion rate - the probability of web visitors delivering the most wanted response, which is buying from you

Percent of new (or unique) visitors on your website

Ratio of new to returning visitors on your site

Amount of time a visitor remains on your site during an average visit

Page "stickiness" - the landing pages' probability to successfully retain a visitor

There are several good web analytics tools available: Click Tracks, Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst

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There is not much difference between SEO content and optimized content. As you may already know, SEO means search engine optimization. If your web page is search-engine-optimized, it means the search engines are going to love it and are going to give it a higher ranking compared to non-optimized pages.

When you search engine optimize a website, you not only write optimized — keywords-centric — content for that website, you also fine-tune the meta tags and insert the missing attributes. There are many tags the search engines use to evaluate how your website should fare. To search engine optimize a website, that is, to SEO a website, you not only have to be a good writer — actually, a bit better than just a good writer — you should also know your HTML and CSS stuff well. Unless you know the nitty-gritty of the source code, how can you improve that source? More experienced search engine optimizers believe that having good, relevant content on your website ensures decent search engine optimization. I agree to an extent because after all the search engines rank you according to the quality of your content. Having lots of relevant content is a sure-shot way of getting ahead of the other websites. Still, I believe a little bit of keyword-density plays a very crucial part. Nobody is quite sure what that density that should be, but the agreeable density should be 4% to 5%. This means if your web page has 100 words, 4 or 5 should be your keywords.

Anyway, search engine optimization is a long process and many factors come into play such as

1.how many important websites are linking to you

2.what is your ranking in other search engines and online directories

3.how often you update your website

4.all the links on your website are working or not

5.what is the condition of your meta tags

6.how relevant is the content on your web page

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