Once you are holding a top position your competition will undoubtedly renew their efforts to take back what you have replaced.

Competition analysis is a step that must be taken to find out what you need to do to take a top position but which also should be performed periodically to detect your competitor's efforts to take back "their" former positions.

In this article we will cover onsite factors which must be considered and in part two we will cover external factor analysis including incoming links, anchor text, PageRank, etc.

Onsite factors

Onsite factors of your website are the easiest to address as they are factors which are under your complete control. You have the power to change anything within your Home Business Start site from the content, internal linking structure, and even the design structure itself.

Key onsite factors that must be considered in competition analysis are:

• Titles and Meta tags

• Keyword density and content

• Special formats and positioning

There are many tools that are available to help you determine what the optimal levels are. Generally these are knows as KDA (Keyword Density Analysis) tools.
The reason to choose SEO Optimizer is twofold.

First, it provides very easy to read and thorough information that can be analyzed quickly and second, it has built in tools to analyze offsite factors to a level that don't exist in whatever software.

Essentially this means for you that a single tool can basically give you the recipe you will need to take and hold your position in the top ten.

Title and Meta tags.

While Meta tags definitely don't hold the weight they once did they are certainly worth adding to your Home Business Start site given that they take seconds to add.

Titles on the other hand hold significant weight and must be created carefully to insure that they hold maximum SEO effectiveness and also that they appeal to the searchers.

In analyzing the titles and Meta tags essentially you are looking for the optimal keyword density of those tags. A KDA tool will let you know what percentage of your competitions tags are made up of the targeted keywords.

A good KDA tool will also display the range or average of percentages. Due to their low weight, Meta tags don't have to be given quite the attention that titles do. When you are optimizing your titles you will want to insure that you fall somewhere near the middle of the pack.

Hopefully in your industry, the top ten sites have relatively close percentages in which case it is easy to determine what the optimal percentage is, however assuming that they don't, you will want to gear your title tag to something that falls in the upper end of the range (though not over) of densities and also keep that title interesting to the searcher who will see it as the link to your site in the search results.

Google at least and probably the other major engines as well have or will be adding into the ranking algorithm a function that records the number of times a specific link is clicked when it appears in the results.

If your site appears in the top of the results but is not click at a rate that is acceptable for that position your website will slip.

Like any other marketing tool, your title tag is the gateway from the search engine results to your website: insure you've created an attractive welcome mat.

Analyzing your competition should be the second step taken during the SEO process (right after and sometimes even during keyword selection). Looking at what and how your competition have positioned their website where you want yours to be placed will lend great insight into how to get yours there.