© 2008 Cybertrack Marketing Inc. All Rights Reserved
Step 2 - Know Your Competition
The top competitors on the search results leave a trail of evidence behind them that tells the well trained web marketer eyes what got them to the top of the results.
This section will show you step-by-step how to reverse engineer your top competitors' websites. Also, well lay the foundation of an optimization and link building road map for you to follow that will guarantee your websites success.
Methods to find your online competitors
Competition research would not be complete without using some very powerful competition spying tools.
Here is a list of competitor spying tools :
Find related sites using Google's related command. The search engines know better than anyone what the most closely related websites are in a specific keyword genre. Type the "related" command into Google like this: related:www.yoursite.com. This command will return a list of pages that Google thinks are related to your site. Now try the command with a competitor's site, as you can see there are endless possibilities to find as many related sites as possible.
Use Google's "define" search command. If you want Google to tell you which sites are considered an "authority" on specific keyword phrases, simply enter this command: define:keyword. Google will show you all the websites that are considered valuable resources on those subject matters. Try to enter some of your own keywords to see which sites come up in the search results. You may notice by clicking through some of the results that most of the pages are glossary of term type of pages. This is something to keep in mind for later when building content for your website. Adding a glossary page containing your industry specific keyword terms and their definitions is a great idea.
Spyfu is a free research tool for discovering the keywords and ads your competitors are using on Google. You can enter a keyword phrase or a competitor's domain to gain access to their target keywords, current organic ranking, related keyword phrases, and other Adwords advertisers bidding on the same keywords. You have to keep in mind the Spyfu tool is very experimental; nonetheless, a great way to get some estimate of the total number of clicks your competitors are receiving and their average ad position.
Google Alerts will send you email alerts based on your keywords. Every time there is some new development related to your specified keyword phrases on Google search, blog, news, or groups, it will send you an email alert. The keywords you specify can include your own website URL or your competitors web address. This is a great way to find out what's being said about you and your competitors.
If you are looking for proven keywords, look no further. Your top ranking competitors pages are loaded with keywords you probably never even thought of. The Cybertrack Marketing Competitor analysis report can extract the most frequently used keywords from any web page easily and accurately. It goes beyond just extracting META keywords. It can harvest keywords from any HTML tag that can be found in the HTML source code of the web page.
Conclusion
Your competitors have spent a considerable amount of time and effort coming up with their keyword selection and the optimization of their sites.
You can take advantage of their efforts to expand or refine your own keyword list and learn about their on-page optimization techniques. The search engines and other online tools give us a great deal of insight into our competitor's online campaigns. Before jumping head first into the optimization of our sites, we should thoroughly understand what our competitors are doing online. At the same time, you should not overestimate your competitors ability to find the best suited keywords.
You should practice due diligence and verify your competitors' keyword selection with the methods we have outlined in the Keyword Research lesson.
| |||
 | ||||
| ||||
FREE TIPS & TOOLS
SEO & WEB MARKETING INFO
