One of the best ways to grow your search engine marketing is to take a minute to study your competitors. New paths and ideas to success will open in your industry when you analyze your competition. Below are ways to help you in analyzing the competition.

URL Structure: Firstly find out how the URL of the competitor looks, whether   they are static/dynamic, whether they are written with words giving a brief idea about the content of the webpage.

Meta Data: One should analyze the Meta Data of the competitor’s website. Emphasis should be given in finding out the meta keywords that are incorporated in the meta data of the pages. Are they visible in the title and description for the page One should also check if the meta keywords are visible in the title and description of the particular webpage.

Site Map: Convenient internal navigation plays an important role for boosting ranks. The search engines can crawl the website easily if text based links are provided to navigate to the internal pages.

Link Popularity: To have a successful website link popularity is the key to success. Look at how many quality links link back to the sites of your competitors. The more legitimate and quality links that lead back to a site, the higher the ranking with specific keywords will be. Search engines weigh sites with link popularity better than those without, in turn, boosting ranking of course. By using this method, you can find which keywords will help you gain the most visibility.

Site Age: Fact is the longer your site has been up the better influence you have in search engine rankings.

Indexed Pages: This term refers to the amount of pages that are indexed within a search engine. Actually, the most popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN easily index top websites.

Home Page PR – It is the Google Page Rank. Google gives a 0-10 score for assessing the value of the webpage. This is generally dependent on the quality and quantity of incoming links. It is the most popular metric for all the webmasters to check. It can be checked by the Google Toolbar or a site like PRChecker.

Strongest Pages: There are a few online SEO tools that provide strongest pages tools, which show important pages on a domain. One of these being SEOmoz. The number of links that point to the website and the pages current rankings is what it goes by. By using this method, you can see which pages are causing high rankings. It can give you a better idea of the type of content you need to produce similar results.

Now you have all the necessary tools to see where your competitor’s traffic comes from and with that knowledge comes much power. You can now tell your web desinger this information to increase the traffic to your own website.