BWMagic’s Internet Marketing News



How Well Do You Know Your OWN Site? Your Competitor’s?
These Handy SEO Tools Will Reveal All!

Needless to say, if you have a website, you will already know
it is becoming very competitive on the web. If you’re in a
lucrative niche market you will have probably already felt this
competition, not only from webmasters like yourself, but also
from major multi-billion dollar companies who have wised up
and SEOed up to take advantage of all this free organic traffic
coming from the search engines.

The competition is getting brutal.

For example, in some of my niche markets, I am competing to
get on the first page in Google for keywords that have over
220,000,000 competing pages. Hitting those first 10 spots is
where the money is located. You have to get onto that first
page in order to see your best results. And it is becoming
harder and harder to stay in those top 10 spots.

Of course, one marketing tactic is to simply NOT compete at
all, and go for the “long-tail keyword phrases” which have
less traffic but also less competition so you can get on the
first page of Google within a few days. This route will save
you a lot of frustration and sleepless nights.

However, if you’re like me and have held some lucrative keywords
on the first page of Google for over 4 or 5 years… seeing other
webmasters and especially big corporations come in and bump your
listing off the first page – totally ticks me off!

As the competition gets harder, you have to get smarter. Especially
if you have a small site with limited resources to spend on building
links and creating unique content. So you have to try and outwit your
competition.

Now if you know me, I am always pushing the “knowledge” button.
The more you know about your competition, the more able you are
to compete with them. And to a certain extent, the more you know
the more able you are to even beat your competition.

Over the years, I have used countless tools and software programs
to really get to know my competition. Thankfully, there are many
free programs you can use to discover most of what you should know
about your competition.

First, simply using the Google search engine will tell you who is
listed on the first page for your chosen keyword or keywords.
It will also tell you how many pages you’re competing against.
Now if you have a multi-worded phrase put quotation marks around
the “keyword phrase” and do an exact search in Google, which will
tell you the number of webpages which has this exact phrase
on them. This is probably your true competition.

Then you have to take a close look at your competition. Here is
one free tool that has been around since 2005 and you don’t even
have to sign-up to use it.

www.reactionengine.com

Just type in your site’s URL + a keyword and this tool will analyze
the SEO factors for you. They will even give you a “grade” for your
page!

But most importantly, they will give you some very valuable
information about your own site or your competitor’s site. You
can use this information to better design your site to hit all
the proper SEO signals which the search engines use to rank your
site.

In a recent WebProNews video interview, Matt Cutts said Google
has over 200 signals which it uses to rank pages. Now these
are the ranking factors that Google uses to rank your pages.

But really they are signals… give off the wrong signals and your
page will go down in the rankings. You really want all your
on-page SEO signals to be done right – simply because this is something
you have total control over.

For example, if you use the link above, it will tell you how
well you’re using your site against a certain keyword:


– is your main keyword in the title?

– is it in the meta tags?

– is it in the heading?

– is it in the body?

All these things do affect how well your site ranks in the
search engines. So it might be beneficial to take a look at
your site and see how will it does. And make any appropriate
changes.

Once you have taken a really close look at your site or page,
then you have to examine your main competition. Take a look at
how their site performs for your chosen keyword. What are
they doing differently from you? How are their pages optimized
for the search engines? See how they are ranked?

Now, look at how you can improve your site to better compete
with your competition. By first getting all your on-page SEO
factors/signals better optimized will help you compete better
with your competition.

Of course, there are many different sites like the one above
which you can use to find out more information about your
competition. I also like using:

www.compete.com
www.seotoolbook.com
www.iwebtool.com

Plus, as you probably know, I am a long-time user of the
Firefox Toolbar Add-on from

SEO Quake

This handy SEO toolbar gives me all the important SEO pointers
about a site while I am surfing. It does slow down your browser
a bit, but the information you get is as they say: priceless.

When I am checking out a site – either my competitor or when I
am looking for search partners, one thing I always check out on
this toolbar is the “SEMRush SE Traffic Price” this tells me the
worth of the search engine traffic this site is receiving each month.
If they had to pay for this traffic – that’s how much it would cost
them. Someone with $500,000 worth of traffic coming in each month,
probably knows what they’re doing when it comes to keyword positioning.

And another one is Alexa.com which I like to use to see the
traffic numbers, but also to check some of the links my competing
sites have. One marketing tactic, go out and try to get the same links
as your competition. If you want to truly compete with your competition
and beat them, you have to “out-link” them.

You also have to take a really close look at their whole site and
how it is constructed. What social network/bookmark sites are they
using? Are they using Twitter? Are they using Facebook? Are they
using Adsense? How many pages do they have indexed in the search
engines?

All of these things will add to your “knowledge” about your
competition. The more knowledge you have, the better you will
be able to compete…

Anyway, this is just some of the things you can do to check out
how well your site is optimized for SEO and also some ways
you can check out your competition. Go get ’em!

Helping You Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
Titus

https://www.bizwaremagic.com

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