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 would ask him a Question about his Business he would laugh and reply does Macy's Tell Gimbel's. (At the Time Gimbel's was a major Competitor of Macy's in the New York Department Store Market.) Well if Macy's were on the Internet back 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 at the 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 keywords appear on these pages and how often. Just go to http://ewguru.com/tagtool and type in www.l-oma.com and click submit. You will get a Report. The Top of the Report contains information on the Title, Description and Keyword Meta Tags we will use these later now scroll down until you see the Report Heading [The Keywords Found on Page]

This Heading tells you the Keyword Density for the Keywords and Keyword Phrases on this Page. You will notice the 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 [Keywords found in the IMG Alt tags] The Alt tag of an image is the text a user sees when the Image can't be displayed. In this case they are not using Alt Tags. They could improve slightly by adding Alt Tags to their Images. Maybe for the Pillow they could place 'Enjoy this Comfortable Buck Wheat Pillow' in the Alt Tag

Scroll up a little more and you will see the Heading [Keywords found in the Anchor tags] This tells which Keywords 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. Scroll up 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. This is the Title that appears between the title and /title HTML Tags in the Header. The Report tells you the actual title is 'Quality Buckwheat Pillows Handcrafted in Maine by L-OMA'

The 2nd Heading tells you The Title relevancy to page content 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 tags report] is Description. Think of this as a Summary of what is contained on the Page. This is also what Google, Yahoo and MSN Display when you're listing appears. Ideally the Description should match perfectly with what is on the Page, in this Example this tool won't measure the Description because it is over 200 Characters Google, MSN and 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 Name L-OMA. Notice too that it uses lots of word like Neck, Spine and sleeping that appear in the Keyword Density Report. 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 Keywords they want to be indexed under and how well this page Matches. They got an 84% match which means out of the 19 Keywords they chose only 84% or about 16 Appear on this Page. 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 the Link tool and Type in www.l-oma.com and then click. You will Notice that they have 16 Backwards links from Google, 312 from Yahoo and 3 from MSN. Click on 312 under Yahoo and you get to see who is linking to them. Likewise click on 16 under google and 3 under MSN to see who they list as Back Links. Can you get links from these web sites too.

7 - What Other Keywords to use

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

Go back through the steps with these new keywords and see what else you can learn. You may want to target some of the Less Popular Keywords first to get your own High Page Rank.

Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001.

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