Analyzing the Competition – Check Indexes

The beauty of the Internet is the inherent open nature of competition. It is so open, you can check indexes when analyzing the competition to improve your site.

Analyzing the Competition

A key step to any search engine optimization effort is to analyze the competition. The simplest way to do this is to simply go to their site and look at the code. Most browsers let you do this by clicking the “view” tab and then selecting “source.”


You competition isn’t stupid. Many sites will bar browsers from showing source code using the above technique. If your competition takes this step, is there anything you can do? Yes, there is.

Indexes

Almost everyone knows how to check if their site is indexed in a search engine. Simply go to the engine and search for “site:yourdomainname.” This technique can also be used to see what your competition is up to.

If you want to see a glimpse of how a competitor is pursuing search engine optimization, check how many pages are indexed in the relevant search engine. Do a search for “site:competitorsdomainname.” You’ll be presented with a list of their pages, the meta title and meta description. This works particularly well with Google.


The resulting list of pages can be analyzed in a couple of different ways. First, you can isolate the particular keywords being pursued by the site. These should then be compared to your site to ascertain whether you’re missing anything. You almost always are missing a key niche. Second, you can analyze the meta description to see both the layout and particular formation of sentences and keyword placement they are pursuing. Again, compare it to yours. Using this process, you can get an idea of how your efforts differ from a competitor.

Importantly, this approach should not be overvalued. It is only a glimpse of the competitor’s site, not a thorough review. It will tell you nothing about how pages are arranged, keyword density approaches and so on. You’ll have to hunt and peck around the site for that information. Still, the meta information gained from this approach makes it worth a go if you are shut out from the code of a site.

See more: http://www.marketingtitan.com/internet_marketing_articles

The Secret To Getting Indexed In Yahoo

Getting indexed in Yahoo has become very difficult in the last few months. The indexing robot, Yahoo!Slurp, has become erratic. For some sites, the robot will view all pages, but only add a few to the Yahoo database. For other sites, sub-domain listings actually start disappearing! So, what’s the secret to getting indexed?

Pleasing Yahoo!Slurp

The secret to getting indexed in Yahoo involves constant updates to your site. The updates, however, have to be done on both the site and through Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. Here’s how you go about getting indexed.

Read more »

How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website

Competitors' websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. Here is an article on how to analyze a competitor's website.

Identifying the Leaders

Start off by identifying the major players. A good place to do this is Yahoo’s directory. It is good to view the major players in similar fields to your own so that you have a better view of your web site as perceived by others. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Check some of the bigger companies and find out some of the innovative approaches and new products offered.
Read more »

The Internet Marketer and Site Designer - The Chicken and The Egg

An age-old question is, “Which came first? The Chicken or the Egg?” In ecommerce, the same question can be applied to site designers and Internet marketers.

Before we settle the answer, we need a few parameters. For purposes of this discussion, a marketer is some formulating and creating Internet marketing strategies and campaigns. This includes search engine optimization. In using the term “designer”, we are throwing a bigger net to include programmers and people writing html.

Read more »

Long Term Marketing Strategy

Once your site is up and running, the best method for getting immediate traffic is pay-per-click search engine marketing. Although you have to be patient, you should also be focusing on search engine optimization as a long term strategy.

Search Engine Optimization – “SEO”

Search engine optimization, or “seo” as it is better known, is the definitive long term Internet marketing strategy. So, what is it? Seo simply refers to taking steps to make sure your site appears high in non-paid search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Read more »

Short Term Marketing Strategy

After spending a lot of time and effort on building a site, many wonder where they should start with Internet marketing. Site owners can be bombarded with pitches about marketing and it is hard to sort out what should be done. In this article, a short term marketing strategy is discussed.

The single best short term marketing strategy is pay-per-click marketing campaigns. A “PPC” campaign simply involves placing advertisements on the results pages of search engines. In essence, you open an account with the PPCs, develop a list of keywords and create ads for those keywords. The two best PPC platforms are Google Adwords and Overture.

Read more »

Internet Advertising for Business

The two prime internet advertising platforms for business are pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Whether search engine optimization is technically advertising is debatable, but we will assume as much for this article. The issue we are going to discuss today applies equally to either of these platforms as well as any other internet advertising you undertake.

Read more »