Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 3

Applying Collected Data

In This Chapter

• Applying best practices to your page construction
• Identifying what’s natural for your competitors
• Sizing up what engagement objects you need
• Building your link equity with a little help from your competitors
• Examining how your competitors organize their content
• Applying your analysis to help with content siloing

Your real competitors online are the sites that show up at the top of the results whenever someone searches for your keywords (words or phrases that people enter as a search query), not necessarily the big name brand in your industry. So if you want your classic car customization business to rank well in the search engines, for example, you can run searches for your main keywords to see who your competition is.

If you just finished the exercises in Chapters 1 and 2 of this minibook, you should have a spreadsheet full of data on your top competitors. Looking at the web pages that the search engines find most relevant for your keywords is a crucial step in your search engine optimization (SEO). Looking at them, you can find out what’s “natural” for your competition. For example, you could find that all the top-ranked web pages have more than 1,000 words of text. You can be pretty sure that if you’re going to rank well for that keyword, you’re going to have to beef up your page’s content to match the competition.

Search engines include many different page factors in their algorithms (in this context, formulas for determining ...