Google’s automated robot or Googlebot reviews your website to determine how relevant your site is to its users. It does this by looking at what is called On-Page and Off-Page factors.

On-page factors are components such as the Title, the URL, the Description and the Header tags. If your keyword appears in these components, then your page is said to be on-page optimized for that keyword. Off-page factors on the other hand are components such as the age of your domain and the number & quality of incoming links to your page. If you have a lot of high authority sites linking to your page, then it is taken that you must be delivering valuable content.

Google therefore uses both on-page and off-page factors to determine how valuable your website is, which in turn determines where it will appear in the search results pages for the keyword.

Conducting an SEO Analysis of  the top 10 websites that are currently competing for the keywords you’re interested in saves you the time and effort of trying to compete in niches that are extremely competitive and that might not be accessible to you and your online business.

Looking at the off-page factors that you consider when evaluating your competition:

Domain Age: Google tends to give preference to websites that have been online for a number of years. Younger websites could be an indication of accessibility.

Page Rank: Google’s estimation of the authority of a domain. The lower the page rank, the more accessibility the website could be.

Back Links to Page: The number of back links to the specific page listed in Google. Fewer back links means that you have a good chance to compete.

Back Links to Domain: The number of links pointing to the domain as a whole. Again, fewer back links means that you have a good chance to compete.

Back Links from .EDU and .GOV: The number of back links from .EDU (education institutions) and .GOV (government institutions). Back links from these domains command a greater authority than links from other domains.

Listing in the DMOZ/Yahoo Directory: DMOZ is one of the largest human review directories while Yahoo is a paid directory. Sites listed in these directories command higher authority.

And now for the on-page factors:

Title: Web pages that have the keyword in the title tag tend to rank higher.

URL: Web pages that have the keyword in the URL tend to rank higher.

Description: Web pages that have the keyword in the description tag tend to rank higher.

Header: Web pages that have the keyword in the header tags tend to rank higher

Cache Age: Cache Age indicates the number of ages since the Googlebot re-indexed the website.

This article assumes that you are using Market Samurai. For you free trial, click here. Another alternative is the SEO plugin for Firefox.