Do-it-Yourself Internet Marketing/Who are your Top Competitors ?

(I've been away for a while working frantically on my new website and I'm back now, ready to continue sharing the info from "The Art of SEO".)


        Who are your Top Competitors ?

Your top competitors will be found in the top half of page one of the your search engine results for the keywords you type in.
More important is finding out how competent your top competitors are at SEO.

This is done by answering these questions

i) Are all their web pages, including product pages, in the search engines' data base ? Use netconcepts.com/urlcheck or theirdomain.com to find out
A site with only a small percentage of its' data in Google is most likely unfriendly to search spiders.

ii) Does each page have keyword-rich titles(title tags) You can discover a sites page titles in Google or Yahoo by using yourcompetitor.com

iii) Do the product and category pages have high page rank scores

iv) Is anchor text throughout the site, particularly in navigation, keyword-rich?

 v) Are they being penalized for copyright infringes?
     Find out with  copyscape.com

vi) Are they spamming with doorway passages ?


Uncovering Their Secrets

1. Keywords.
Find page title in the blue bar at top of your webrowser.
Look in the "view source" of your browser under "meta name".

2. Who's linking to their popular pages

3. Examine the"cached" version of your rivals pages to see what the search engines see, as compared to what the public sees. This button is next to the search results in Google.

4.To get info on rivals' traffic, use compete.com , quantcast.com, alexa.com, http://trends.google.com/websites?q=(name of site)
Paid ones are comscore.com and  hitwise.com

You've probably noticed that the title of this series is changed to "Internet Marketing". That's because my research tells me that "internet marketing" is  used far more as a search term.

The Anatomy of a Search /Do it Yourself Online Marketing Pt 9

The Anatomy of a Search 

The continuation of  my SEO research, based mostly on "The Art of SEO, 

Mastering Search Engine Optimization"by Eric Enge et al
This information is valuable for anyone who owns a website, from musicians
& artists, to accountants & retailers...any type of businesses.

There are about a trillion pages on the internet that Google knows of. 

A company named Jupiter released a report stating that, paid search 

advertising should continue to be the largest category of online spending, 

growing from 9 billion in 2007, to 21 billion in 2009, even though it's a 

proven fact that  if your websites  dwells among the top 3 rankings in a 

natural search, your link has 2-3 times the valuable of paid advertising.

You have to ask yourself, " Why does business continue to spend their 

advertising this way? It's because the Pay Per Click  model is easiest for 

business to understand, as it is more similar to traditional marketing 

methods, than SEO, in that the ROI can be tracked more readily.

Based on this value ratio of SEO  to paid ads, SEO path will become the 

way of the future for advertising budgets.

There are 2 arms of SEO

1.Offline: This is things done on your actual site such as keywords, content, 

meta tags, etc.

2. Online: Getting link backs to your site, from other sites on the internet

      

A search engines' main goal is to generate revenue via advertising, mostly 

through pay-per-click ads, which means advertisers pay only when people 

click on their ads.

People use the  search engines that are perceived as delivering the most 

relevant, & accurate answers, in the least amount of time. Resultingly, 

search engines are forced to invest a lot of their resources on achieving these 

goals in order to be successful, and people who try and manipulate their 

search engine rankings, that result in non-relavent results, (spam) are

seriously penalized by the search engines.

The 3 Steps of the Search Process areas follows

1) The need of an answer to one of the following queries

i) navigational, where the intent is to arrive at a specific website, eg. acme plumbing

ii) transactional, where the intent is to buy something eg.digital camera

iii) informational,looking for knowledge with no particular source in mind. eg.hockey score

2) Expressing that query in a string of keywords or a phrase ComScore shows 

the average query is 3 words in length

3) Executing the query

Who Searches

Almost equal between male & females

Determining Intent of the Searcher

Most searchers don't understand how search engines work. Searchers often 

provide a query that is too general and doesn't provide the search engine or 

marketer with the info needed to determine the intent of the searcher.

Because of this, general queries are important because searchers at least find 

out about you, & thus begins the start of the sales process...building trust.

Be aware that many of your website visitors arrive looking for something 

else, & are not likely to help your business goals.

For the purposes of marketing, it's crucial you understand how your 

target market searches for your service/product, therefore, we use queries 

to help us determine keywords

Queries are ranked in value as follows.

Transactional: very high...the potential for some kind of transaction, be

                        it financial,or subscription etc.

Informational: middling...the potential attract inbound links, followed by the potential

                         to convert to a transaction

Navigational: low...except with searches on the publisher's own brand

                         he potential  to pull searcher away from intended destination

Using this info you can build your own keyword chart, to help determine the intent of each one of your primary words, as seen in table 1-4  below.