7 Simple Steps to Spy on Your Online Competition and Acheive a High Page Rank

My Grandfather ran a small Grocery Store and when you wouldask him a Question about his Business he would laugh andreply does Macy's Tell Gimbel's. (At the Time Gimbel's wasa major Competitor of Macy's in the New York DepartmentStore Market.) Well if Macy's were on the Internetback then they could be telling Gimbel's a lot. If Gimbel's knew which tool's to use and what steps to take to 'spy' on Macy's.

All Examples are based on the search term 'buckwheat pillows' I do not sell 'buckwheat pillows',but I did recently order some online.

1 - Who is Number 1 for the Best Keyword.

Go to Yahoo, MSN and Google Type in "buckwheat pillows"see who your Top competitors are. You may want to look atthe top 5 or 10 for results for Yahoo, MSN and Google, Do they overlap, Is someone number 1 in all 3 Searches or are they different. Which result Appears most often in the Top 3, the Top 5, the Top 10. Pick one of your Top competitors and see what else you can learn. Let's use http://www.l-oma.com/ for this example.

2 - What Keywords does use http://www.l-oma.com/ and how often.

The Meta Tag Analyzer tool will tell you which keywordsappear on these pages and how often. Just go tohttp://ewguru.com/tagtool and type in www.l-oma.com andclick submit. You will get a Report. The Top of theReport contains information on the Title, Description andKeyword Meta Tags we will use these later now scroll downuntil you see the Report Heading [The Keywords Found onPage]

This Heading tells you the Keyword Density for the Keywordsand Keyword Phrases on this Page. You will noticethe Keyword 'Pillows' appears 3.76%, 'Buckwheat' 3.29% and'Pillow' 1.88%. You will also see that the Keyword Phrase 'buckwheat pillows' appears 2,88%. A Keyword density of about 3% is just about right for your Target Keywords and Phrases.

Now Scroll up a little you will see the Heading [Keywordsfound in the IMG Alt tags] The Alt tag of an image is thetext a user sees when the Image can't be displayed. Inthis case they are not using Alt Tags. They could improveslightly by adding Alt Tags to their Images. Maybe for thePillow they could place 'Enjoy this Comfortable BuckWheat Pillow' in the Alt Tag

Scroll up a little more and you will see the Heading[Keywords found in the Anchor tags] This tells whichKeywords are being used with there Hyper Links. Keywords in the Anchor can help your ranking. Perhaps they could have said 'Order Buckwheat Pillows' instead of just 'order'.

3 - Title Meta Tag

Let's keep working with the Report from the tagtool. Scrollup the page a little and you will see [Meta tags analysis].and [Meta tags report for:http://www.l-oma.com/index.htm]The First Entry under Both these Headings is Title. Thisis the Title that appears between the title and /title HTMLTags in the Header. The Report tells you the actual titleis 'Quality Buckwheat Pillows Handcrafted in Maine by L-OMA'

The 2nd Heading tells you The Title relevancy to pagecontent is 89%. Yahoo, Google and MSN like this to be fairly accurate. 89% is pretty Good 95% or higher is Ideal.See http://ewguru.com/hbiz/perfectmatch.html for a Quick Lesson on how to get that number to 95% or Greater

4 - Description Meta Tag

The Next Entry under [Meta tags analysis] and [Meta tagsreport] is Description. Think of this as a Summary of whatis contained on the Page. This is also what Google, Yahooand MSN Display when you're listing appears. Ideally theDescription should match perfectly with what is on thePage, in this Example this tool won't measure theDescription because it is over 200 Characters Google, MSNand Yahoo use between 150 and 200 characters in there Listing for this result.

Look over there Description it uses the Keyword Phrase'Buckwheat pillows' 3 Times. It uses the Company NameL-OMA. Notice too that it uses lots of word like Neck,Spine and sleeping that appear in the Keyword DensityReport. The Description is Excellent as it is aims squarely at their target Market.

5 - Keywords Meta Tag

Keywords is the 3rd Row in both the [Meta tags analysis].[Meta tags report]. You get to see the actual Keywordsthey want to be indexed under and how well this pageMatches. They got an 84% match which means out of the 19Keywords they chose only 84% or about 16 Appear on thisPage. Look at their Keyword List

[buckwheat pillow, loma buckwheat pillow, l-oma, back pain,pillow, headache, snoring, neck pain, migraine headache,sleep apnea, tension, muscle pain, stress, buckwheat hull,Maine]

You may want to type in some of their Keywords into Yahoo,MSN and Google and see how they did for those keywords and phrases.

6 - Link Tool (http://ewguru.com/linktool)

To Find out a Little more about www.l-oma.com go to theLink tool and Type in www.l-oma.com and then click.You will Notice that they have 16 Backwards links fromGoogle, 312 from Yahoo and 3 from MSN. Click on 312 underYahoo and you get to see who is linking to them. Likewiseclick on 16 under google and 3 under MSN to see who theylist as Back Links. Can you get links from these web sitestoo.

7 - What Other Keywords to use

The Keyword Suggestion Tool is another Source ofFantastic Information. (http://ewguru.com/kw-suggestion)Just Type in your Keywords 'buckwheat pillows' and find outother Keywords you can use.

Go back through the steps with these new keywords andsee what else you can learn. You may want to target someof the Less Popular Keywords first to get your own High PageRank.

Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001.

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