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Your general research will have identified your competitors in the niche you are interested in entering. There are some further research options available that will provide you with relevant information. SEO research is one of them.

Sometimes your competitor might just have managed to get to the front of the page by sheer luck. They might have written an article in a very specific niche and suddenly found themselves on the front page through no effort except picking a title for an article that puts them there.

Who are the competition? They are the sites that are currently ranking for the keywords you’re considering targeting.

The aim of this section is to research how strong the competition is in terms of ranking for the specific keywords you are targeting. Whether you can beat the competition or not is usually down to your own skill level, so as a beginner you should try and go for the longtails.

A longtail keyword is a phrase that usually has at least 2 or 3 words in it, and it’s much more targeted and less general. They also have less searches per day than other keywords.

There are more criteria to meet in order to find your site on the front page in search than just a lucky title. These criteria include keyword rich and focused content which would be contained in your articles for instance. There would be targeted backend information such as incoming links and meta tags which you might not be able to see when looking at the site.

Whether visible or hidden, both of these play a part in determining where your site ends up when somebody searches for keywords you would have used.

Important criteria to check your competitors against are title tags and backlinks.

The title text is also referred to as a title tag. This is one of many search engine optimisation components that determine the ranking of your site. You will be able to see the text at the top of the browser. Other SEO elements are the text in the search engine ranking and the text that appears between the title tags.

Keywords that are visible at the top of your browser usually have a heavier ranking than words appearing elsewhere on your site. To see who else is using these words as their keywords you type in the words allintitle:”yourkeyword” in the Google search field.

The results will bring up other sites which are using the same keywords as you are searching for. For the keyword ‘health’ the results are 96 million. That is the word health appears in the title tag of 96 million sites. This is an extremely heavily competed for space.

Less than 5000 results is a good sign that you might want to go with these keywords.

A backlink is another expression for a link that is coming in from another site or blog. Backlinks are important as Google will count the number, importance and relevance to your blog of the incoming links and will add this to your overall value.

Now we’re talking! This is one of the biggest factors that Google will use to help determine what keywords your site should rank for. A backlink is simply a link back to your page.

The more backlinks you have, the more popular your site must be, and so more likely to rank on Google.

In other words if you have many links coming from other sites in your field and they are popular sites, that popularity rubs off on your site. Checking the backlinks is therefore a fairly important part of research to do on your competing websites.

As an example, if you check out the topic health and a site has a backlink from Men’s Health then that would be considered a very important backlink. Men’s Health comes up on page one of search if you search for the keyword ‘health’.

As there are 1060 million or so search results for the word health, making it onto the front page of Google for this keyword would mean that a backlink from that first page listed site would be immensely valuable.

Both title tags and backlinks are an important component to any SEO optimised web site. Checking to see how your competitors have handled this will be of great relevance to the internet marketer when determining what niche to enter into.

This is just a taster of keyword and competition research from a beginner’s perspective. There’s more to look into, but you need to learn to walk before you can run.

I’d recommend trying to get a small site ranking for some really easy longtails at first, and once you can do that start moving up the levels until you eventually start to take on the big boys.

If you have any questions please post them in the comments below.