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3.5 Making the first Onpage Optimization Report

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Option 1: Find out best on-page practices, by hand

Come on, do it right now. Just use your competitors' techniques for your own advantage. I've done the same thing, a thousand times, so what do you think, why I insist on it?

Right here, I could put a story telling you:

I started "spying" on my competition in the year of ..., and ... year ago, I used software for that purpose for the first time. All in all, this analysis saved me ... hours that is ... years of life, and it helped me make $.........

But I'm not telling you all this stuff, because:
1) it's just impossible to count;
2) figures don't matter here.

This is what matters: It's just stupid not to spy!

Now I'll tell you how this competitive analysis is done by hand. Try to do what I say, as soon as you're reading it. But don't rush to count anything you can. Stick to my instructions only.

All right. Say, let's count the overall text length and keyword density of a competitor's page. Take your major keyword, for example, wedding ideas, and make a search for it in the Search Engine where you want to rank first. Say, Google.

You'll see your #1 competition.

Number one Google competition
Google results for wedding ideas

Just click their link to get to the page. As soon as the page's loaded, copy all its text into a new MS Word document. Now in the menu choose Tools -> Word Count to see statistics. Check how many words the page contains, total.

Word count
Word document statistics

Look at the screenshot. On http://www.weddingideasmagazine.co.uk, there are 362 words.

Now click Ctrl+F to search for your term in the Word document (I search for wedding ideas). Tick the checkbox Highlight all items found in and select Main document in the combo-box, and then click Find Next.

This number of items found is how many times your competitor uses the keyword or keyphrase you target on the page you're checking.

Number of words found
Statistics for the words found in the document

At the picture, you see "Word found 3 items matching this criteria"

Indeed, the page http://www.weddingideasmagazine.co.uk uses the keyphrase wedding ideas 3 times.

Let's count keyword density for wedding ideas:
3/362*100% = 0.8%

The same way, you need to check each word from the phrase, like I did. Look at the table:

Keyword Words Total Occurrence Density
wedding ideas 362 3 0.8%
wedding 362 21 5.8%
ideas 362 4 1.1%

Believe me, even this small table is of great value. You know why? Hmmm... Let's read it!

What the table says:
"Your top competition is fine with as small as 0.8% keyword density for wedding ideas, but they have pretty high density for the word wedding. So to outrank http://www.weddingideasmagazine.co.uk for the keyword wedding ideas you need to make approximately as much text on the page (300 — 400 words) and maintain approximately the same 0.8% keyword density for the whole keyphrase wedding ideas. But try to make density for the keyword wedding as high as 5.8%, and for ideas 1.1%."

And, just like you calculate keyword density for all the site's contents, you'll need to check it for titles, texts, links, bold-written sections and other elements.

To calculate keyword density in any element of the webpage, you take the number of keywords present in the element you need, divide it by the total number of words in that element and multiply by 100%.

DO IT NOW! Count overall keyword density of your #1 competitor's page.

Slow, I know, but it makes sense, as a totally free method. Sure, there's another way to go. As ever, software tools make things so much easier!


You know what? I've spent eight years, each day on the web, losing and winning, figuring out how it all works — to be as bad-ass as I am now and to make the SEO money I have. And you've got this 8-year-worth knowledge right here, right now, and can see how it works, in real time. I even envy you...Honestly! No try-and-error or endless studying, just confidently doing SEO — and raising paychecks. What could be nicer? And these SEO tools...where they all were 8 years ago??? And here's the greatest thing for me to know: you've got your best opportunities today to make real money on the web, much faster than I did, and I'm happy to point your chances out to you!

Now read what I tell you next, and find out what'll make your life over a thousand times easier!

24 comments

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2008-09-23 14:47:28: John Massey

Please clarify. You say

to outrank http://www.weddingideasmagazine.co.uk for the keyword wedding ideas you need to make approximately as much text on the page (300 - 400 words) and maintain approximately the same 0,8% keyword density for the whole keyphrase wedding ideas. But try to make density for the keyword wedding as high "as 5,8%, and for ideas 1,1%."

Wouldn't your site have the identical keyword density in this case, and if so, how could you outrank them?

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2010-08-03 16:12:19: John Kiwanuka

More back links! put meta tags with the keyword. H1,H2,H3 all optimized for the keyword.!

All the best.

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2008-09-24 03:57:54: Dan Richmond

Wouldn't your site have the identical keyword density in this case, and if so, how could you outrank them?

Yes, your site will have the same density, as the "ideal" site. What we're talking about now is important, but onpage optimization alone will hardly let you outrank your competitor. It's just one of the steps of the full cycle. Link building brings higher rankings (though on-page work is no less important). Mainly, you will outrank your competition with links, and this will be discussed in the following chapters.

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2009-06-02 11:43:43: Dan Richmond

@ Krisjanis Berzins

Yep, that's the universal law for any kind of business but it still makes sense reminding!

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2009-09-25 10:38:31: anna negrean

the result for: occurance of the keyword/total words*100% won't come out right only if I multiply by 100.

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2009-10-22 13:35:33: Enson Arantes

hehe anna, it's a simple math. it's the same as (300/362)%, 300 comes from 3x100.

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2009-12-08 21:02:28: Ken Taylor

I'm glad you mentioned to check for the sites 'total content'. Wish you mentioned earlier, as I wasn't sure how to go about copying text from this site. But now it's clear.

I wonder if the site has been updated since your above example:
I got 533 words total
with 8 'wedding ideas'
giving me a 1.5% KW density.

Can you confirm?

(note: I used Bean a free WP for Mac)

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2009-12-09 12:36:30: Dan Richmond

I guess the density has changed at weddingmagazine, but you aren't intending to outrank this website are you?

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2009-12-10 14:32:16: ian shere

I am reading that KWD is an SEO thing of the past. Please comment.

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2009-12-13 19:59:50: Ken Taylor

@Dan Richmond

No, not at all. I was just going through the motions to help me learn the lesson. I'm actually interested in other kinds of niches.

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2009-12-21 11:00:29: Dan Richmond

@ian shere

Do you mean keyword density? Do you have a link? Websites are still ranking thanks to the wise keyword stuffing...

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2010-01-03 05:37:00: Paul Watchorn

Ony calculator the calculation comes out with 0.00828 (8%, which kind of sugests to me that the figure is point 00 of a percent, what am I doing wrong here, this is a really important part of the process.

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2010-01-03 05:57:26: Paul Watchorn

I would like to hear more of this 'that KWD is an SEO thing of the past' from Ian shere.
It sounds totally at odds with what Google seems to be saying at present.
I do understand that 'linking' is the big thing at the moment, (and I know that we are due to cover it later in the book) but to be honest (from a layman’s viewpoint) the first thing to go if Google was bright enough, should be this 'linking' thing.
I mean I have looked all over to try to get up to speed with SEO, and I quite often find my self looking at 'SEO expert' forums with a big sign saying 'no spamming' and then thread after thread of posts with people openly selling links, or doing just about everything to garner them.
I mean, at the end of the day the so called 'voting' for pages by linking to them is so far out of date as to be useless for people just wanting a good search result.
Why can't Google and the like simply invent something more relevant? It's like I could go buy loads of links and a have a site that just about covers a few keywords, and it would get higher rankings than say a site that has been around for years with just what the searcher is really looking for. Less than ideal I feel, perhaps it will all become clear later in the book.

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2010-01-05 10:01:47: Dan Richmond

@Paul Watchorn

Ony calculator the calculation comes out with 0.00828 (8%,...

0.008 is 0.8% , not 8% . Or am I not getting your point?

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2010-01-05 10:06:35: Dan Richmond

@Paul Watchorn

I mean, at the end of the day the so called 'voting' for pages by linking to them is so far out of date as to be useless for people just wanting a good search result.

Honestly, I can hardly see any other technical possibilities to evaluate sites by a machine, not a human. I totally believe that at least for the nearest couple of years links will be the major factor.

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2010-03-21 10:20:54: Rituraj Sharma

Wow Its really good way to analyze and make a statical report.
But dear sir one thing is not clear that how does keyword density differs for different kind of themes?

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2010-03-23 12:24:59: Dan Richmond

Rituraj, I can only assume things here, not say for sure.

1) Some words are more frequently used in any language and some are less. For example, you would need the word "language" on a webpage talking about languages more often than the word "macaroni" on a webpage about macaroni (at least because "language" has fewer synonyms.)
Another example: the word dog can be used 20 times on a page and this will look natural, while the word "zymolyte" is rarely used in the real life, so a high concentration on a page could sound strange.

2)
There are certain sites ranking top in a particular niche. They have certain amount of text and certain keyword density. This density becomes something like a statistical norm to which any other site gets compared. If the average norm is about 10 for a certain word in a certain niche, and you use it a) once or b) 30 times - this may look a) the word is unrelated to your site or b) your site is overoptimized for the word.

Once again, these are just theories, I'm not sure here what Google things. The only thing that's for sure is, keyword density does differ from niche to niche.

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2010-03-23 23:36:55: Rituraj Sharma

Thank you Dan for your value-able answer.

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2010-08-10 14:29:11: Shoaib Abdullah

Hey great tutorial. I have a question.
While copying the content of competitors should I copy the whole web page(including product description, navigation or ads) or just copy the only important writings.

Thanks,
Shoaib

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2010-08-10 16:10:38: Callgirls Escorts

You must never copy content from anyone!!
If you do,it would be "Duplicate Content" to the Searchengines,it even hurts Copyright laws!
If you like your Competiors Content, you can lean on it and use your own words and style to write about it. DC is a big "no-no" on the Web.

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2010-08-10 22:35:49: Shoaib Abdullah

@Callgirls Escorts
Probably you didn't understand my question. I have not told anything about copying a content and paste it to my website. I just asked that what should copy to measure the keyword density.

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2010-08-13 04:01:12: Dan Richmond

In that case you need to get to the competitors' page source and copy the main page elements - title, body, h1 headings etc. - and analyze densities within them.

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2010-08-13 04:08:18: Shoaib Abdullah

I have got a tool to measure the keyword density. http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/

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2010-09-02 08:07:11: Ivo Valentinov

This is a lot of work.

Dan, how accurate is this software?

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