I mentioned in my last post that I was going to start righting about how to improve your search engine results, and attract more readers to your blog. So this is the first step in that process.

One of the things I love about the blogging community is the spirit of cooperation that exists. There is a sort of camaraderie among fellow bloggers that you don’t always find in other areas of life. That doesn’t change the fact that other blogs are your competition, especially blogs that are in your niche.

Like the rest of us, your readers only have a limited number of hours. As much as they may want to spend hours everyday leisurely reading all of the different blogs they are interested in, the reality is, they don’t have that kind of time. If you want them to be a regular reader of your blog, you need to effectively compete with your fellow bloggers to attract and retain them to your site. That requires a little competitive research.

To keep it simple, I’ll be focusing on using Google, because it is one of the best sources of free traffic, but the techniques will help with the other search engines, too.

When you search for your desired keyword phrase you are likely to see hundreds of thousands, or even millions of competing sites. Before you start to feel too overwhelmed you need to remember a couple of things. First, the majority of those sites are irrelevant to you. They are there because they use some combination of your keywords. They are not trying to list for your keyword phrase. Second, you don’t have to try to beat millions of competitors, you only need to beat one. If your goal is to get listed on the first page of Google all you have to do is beat the 10^th ranked page. That page has already beaten all of the pages below it. Concentrate on beating one page and taking there spot on Google.

Keyword Analysis

The first thing you will need to do when starting your competitive analysis is to find out how your competitor is using their keywords. The simplest way to accomplish that is to find the page you want to beat on Google, and instead of clicking the link that takes you to their page, look at the bottom of that listing and click on the “Cached” link.

This will take you to a copy of the page that Google has cached. This allows you to see a copy of the page that Google has cached with the words you searched for highlighted on the page. You can quickly and easily see where and how often your competitor is using the keywords on that page.

Another handy tool that is free to use is Textalyser. Type in the URL of the page you want to analyze, and Textalyser returns a keyword density analysis. This lets you know exactly how often the keywords were used by your competition, both by number of keywords, and the density of their use.

Links Analysis

One way to improve your ranking in Google is to build a lot of quality back links to your site. How many do you need? Well, more is better, but if all you are trying to do is beat one particular site, you might want to see what they are doing.

By typing “link:(competitors URL)” into the Google search box, you will get a list of all of the links pointing to that page. Unfortunately you will have to scroll through the pages of links to see which ones can help you. I would suggest checking out the SeoQuake Add-on for FireFox. With this add-on activated it will give you a small bar at the top of the page showing several things about a particular site, including links (both internal and external). When you click on one of those links it gives you a much easier to read list of links, separated by internal and external links.

This is very helpful because it allows you to see who is linking to this page, and might show you where you can request some links to your page.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Everything your competition is doing is out there for you to use. By using what they have already done, you are one step closer to taking there spot on the Google search results page.

Check back at Writing a Better Blog for more tips on building your blog. If you like what you’ve read, give me a link, a Digg, or a Stumble. There are links on the right make it easy for you. Thanks for reading.

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