SEO

If you're ready to embark on a search engine optimization
campaign, you'll want to take a close look at your competitors.
Either they'll be ahead of you in the SEO world or you'll detect
their deficiencies and rush right past them in terms of search
engine visibility.

Consider the following:

Page Titles

See what kind of page titles competitors use. Do they only include
their name or a page name? How much do they vary?
Is there a different page title for every page? Do they seem to
contain reasonable search terms? Are they dominated
by keywords or marketing messages?

Meta Data

Do they do a good job of providing keyword-rich META descriptions?
What balance do they strike between mentioning the
company's value or special offers and conveying core keywords?

Quality of Content

How much copy is apparent in each page? Is there any emphasis on
the visible text? Can you even count 250 keywords on critical
pages? How are the headers organized? Does the company take
advantage of text navigation?

Robots.Text File

See what the Web site owners are telling the search engines. Are
search engine spiders encouraged or discouraged by the
directions listed in the robots.txt file?

Link Building

Find out how many places are linking to the competitor. You may
not have time to determine the quality of all of the links, but
see how many they have compared to your Web site.

Saturation

Determine how many pages of the Web site have been indexed by
the major search engines. How does each competitor compare to
your efforts to provide relevant content that can be crawled by search engines?

Site Design, Architecture and Technology

Is it professional? How would you describe the design? Is it
SEO-friendly? Does the site rely on static pages or dynamic
content? Are there frames or Flash with the familiar "skip
intro" button?

Rankings

As best you can, select 10 keywords and phrases and find out how
well they're ranking on the major search engines. Do they rank
well? Can you catch up?