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What
Your Competition Knows About Traffic
By
Kari Freckleton
Need
more traffic? There's a lot you can learn from spying on
your competition. Your competition has traffic sources that
you can easily swipe by following these steps.
Step
One: Who should you spy on? You probably can name six to
thirty online competitors. If not, you need to go through
Google and Yahoo with the key terms you target. Who comes
up? Write down everyone who has a business similar to yours,
even if they aren't identical.
Now
you need to figure out who you should spy on first. Begin
with the most successful websites. How do you find them?
It's easy with a couple tools.
The
Google toolbar (toolbar.google.com) is essential for spying.
The Google toolbar features a little bar labeled
"PageRank." Depending on each site, this bar may
be gray, white, or (usually) a combination of green and
white. The more green, the higher Google ranks that page. To
get an exact PageRank, put your cursor over the PageRank
graph and hold it there. Your competitors with the highest
PageRank are the ones you want to look at very closely.
You
also want to spy on the competitors with the most traffic.
To figure out the relative traffic position of your
competition (compared to all web sites), go to alexa.com and
download their toolbar. The Alexa toolbar will display a
number for each website its traffic rank. The lower the
number, the higher the traffic. (For example, Yahoo's Alexa
rank is 1, while Blockbusters' is 2,220.)
Step
two: Snoop through your competitor's log files to see which
sites and search terms send them the most traffic. Is there
a public stats tracker on your competitor's site? If so,
check it out. If not, try typing in your competitor's URL
with /stats.html and /stats/ on the end of it. Often times,
web hosts put statistics here - without password protection.
Still can't find your competitor's stats? Try Googling their
URL and "statistics." It's a long shot, but
sometimes statistics pages will turn up this way.
Step
three: Look at who is linking to your competitor. The
easiest way to do this is to run a backward link search in
Google and Altavista. Simply type in
link:http://www.yourcompetition.com (using your competitor's
URL). You'll find most of the pages that link to your
competitor this way. How do you know which links are the
best? By using the Google toolbar. The pages linking to your
competitor with the highest PageRank are the ones you should
look to for links of your own.
To
steal those links, email all the webmasters that are linking
to your competitor without getting a link back in return.
Figure out why they link to your competitor (good free
content, subject fits site, etc), and give them a better
reason to link to you. Chances are, most of these webmasters
will give you a link as well.
Once
you have these new sites linking to yours, positive changes
in your Google ranking are likely. You may even overtake
your competitor for your targeted search terms especially
if you get links from spying on multiple sites. All from a
little reconnaissance work and some emailing!
Kari
Freckleton, Herndon, VA, aka Greedy Girl, shares her unconventional
ideas for free at http://www.greedygirl.com.
Ready to smoke the competition? Email Kari at
to join her Too Good To Publish marketing club.
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