How to do SEO competitor analysis properly?

Competitor analysis or competition analysis is one of the most essential elements of SEO processes worldwide.It's all about understanding your rivals,discovering their strategies and evaluating their strength in the search engine war.Almost all professional SEO companies have a section (or atleast a team) dedicated for competitor analysis.Why? Because they understand the value which this information provides.It is almost impossible to beat a competing site if you have no idea about the strengths and weaknesses of the site.There are several attributes to be considered while evaluating competition.Some of these attributes are mighty important while some are just minor pieces of information which may come handy at a later stage.
In this article i will discuss some of the techniques and tools i use for competitor analysis.Hopefully the information shared here will help you in your pursuit of better search rankings.

Before we begin the actual procedures, i will recommend you to install a very useful plugin called SEO Quake.The plugin is available for Mozilla Firefox,Google Chrome and Opera.I personally use Firefox because I'm kinda used to it.So go ahead and install SEO Quake on your browser.The plugin is absolutely free and provides plenty of useful information.

Now it's time to start the actual process.

Step 1: List out the keywords you are targeting with your site.

Step 2: Go to Google.com (because it's still the biggest supplier of traffic) and enter the keyword.

Step 3: If you have installed SEO Quake correctly then you will see a section below the search results which mentions various  attributes of the search results.You can find Page Rank,Alexa Rank,SEM Rush rank etc from the SEO Quake section.You can also find the domain age using this tool.Domain age is an important attribute which should not be taken lightly.A page can have better ranking if it is considerably old.

Step 4: Study the various attributes mentioned above to gain a perspective on the competition strength.You can focus on the first page of the search results initially for analysing the strength of the competition.If the competition is too high, do not feel demotivated.There is still hope.

Step 5: Find the page on which your site is listed for the keyword.Check the Page Rank,Alexa Rank and domain authority of the site which is immediately above you.See if that is surpassable.It definitely should be.The competition is usually tight in the first page and this competition will start to weaken
with the succeeding pages.The rankings of the results in these pages normally fluctuate on a weekly (if not daily) basis.

Step 6: Now it's time to check the reason behind the better rankings of your competition.Visit the top ranking pages and see how their page has been laid out.Check the length of the content on their landing pages.Find out how they have used titles and meta description.SEO Quake Toolbar has a button titled
'Diagnosis'.You can click on this button an get information on various On-page attributes of the site.See if you have aptly used these attributes in your own site's landing pages.

Step 7: Once you have made sure that the on page optimization has been done properly, it is time to move on to off page.Basically the competing sites will be ranking higher mainly because of their link profile.It is preferable to make a list of competing sites before you proceed with this step.If you prefer to do without the list, it is also fine. Go to Backlink Watch and enter the URL of your competitor to find out where his inbound links are coming from.Mostly the links would be coming from article directories, blog posts and comment sections.See if you can get links from similar sites.It will be even better if you can get links from where your competitor has been sourcing links.

Your link building strategy should always be about quality link building.Rather than building a list of directories or blogs to publish articles( for links of course),it will be better if you choose the sites which have worked for your competition. 

Step 8: You have almost learned how to properly do competitor analysis.I cannot finish this article before communicating another major point.You should always remember that the key to successful SEO is perseverance.Build links slowly.Try to get links from authentic and high authority site.Don't worry about the numbers,it is much better to stick with quality.I hope you found this article useful.Feel free to drop in your opinions and suggestions as comments.

Find Details About Your Organic Search Engine Traffic Using Google Webmaster Tools

Having a clear idea about the keywords that lead to your site might help you in understanding in a better way the topics in demand on SEs.Rather than reporting on current news that will be irrelevant a few months from now is certainly a bad investment as far as a blogger is concerned.So concentrate on writing timeless content that will keep getting you traffic for a good period of time.And another suggestion,you don't need to bother about getting high PR and competition.If you have a decent PR and you are posting enough there is enough room for you in the industry.It will eventually make you good money.Now let me tell you how to find all the 'queries' for which links to your site show up and get clicked.

First you need to log in to Google webmaster tools.Now add a sitemap to your site if you haven't added yet.This is a great investment as sitemaps results in better crawling of your site.You will have to wait for a week to get your first detailed report of traffic to your site.When your report is ready,Go to the dashboard and click on Statistics and click on Top search queries.On the current page you will be able to see the 'Top 20 queries' that your site show-up on and the 'Top 20 queries' clicked to your site.Now below the table you will see a link 'Download all query stats for this site'.Click on it and you will be able to download a .csv file.Download it and open it on spreadsheet apps like Microsoft excel.You can study in detail about the posts that are really bringing the traffic and this might help in better publishing in days to come.I hope you found this information useful.Keep Blogging and stay with Blogger Whale.

Feedburner Pro Features Now "Free"

First major change on Feedburner after Google acquired it,is here.And what a better way than to give away Pro feature like Total stats and Mybrand for free.

FeedBurner Stats PRO or Total stats allows you to have advance stats about your site feed, such as number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed, as well as site visitors stats.

Here is how you can activate this feature

---

1. Sign in your FeedBurner account

2. Select the FeedBurner feed you want to activate for Feedburner Stats PRO

3. Under Analyze tab, click FeedBurner Stats PRO link under Services

4. At FeedBurner Stats PRO page, tick the “Item views PRO” checkbox to activate the PRO services

5. Click the “Save” button to confirm and activate the FeedBurner Stats PRO services.

6. Done. You will see a little PRO icon near the feed on your FeedBurner “My Feeds” list.


MyBrand allows you to use own domain name for FeedBurner feed. Example: feeds.yourdomain.com, instead of feeds.feedburner.com. Using MyBrand does not affect your feed stats. It only make your feed address consistent to your website address.It is a tough nut to crack for non techies as it needs you to make changes in dns records.However these are the steps you need to carry out for setting this up.

---

1. Sign in your FeedBurner account and click the “My Account” link in the upper left-corner.

2. At My Account page, click the “MyBrand PRO” link under Services

3. This is the hard part. Create a CNAME entry in the DNS records for each domain name you want to use. Then, fill in the domain name(s) to use.

Note: you need to know to configure CNAME for your domain name’s DNS records. You can refer to the Google Apps for Administrators to create CNAME record on popular hosting services, or ask your domain/web hosting provider’s help.

4. Click “Activate” button to save and activate it. It will take up to 24 hours for the CNAME to take effect.

How to prettify Google reader?

Thousands of people use Google reader for fetching feed and it's undoubtedly one of those efficient online feedfetchers.But one minus factor of Google reader is that it's slighlty less eyecandy.Now here's how you can prettify your Google reader.You now can make your Google reader look like a Mac OS X using a grease monkey script-Google Reader Prettifier.It's certainly makes the reader much better an frees you from the monotonous default look.
You can install Google prettifier greasemonkey script from here
If you use internet explorer you can make greasemonkey scripts work for you using this
script

Stay updated.Subscribe to Blogger Whale.

10 Extremely Useful Firefox Extensions

Firefox has a range of extensions to which new ones are just dumped one after the other so rapidly that one looses interest in browsing through the "extension-fall" and satisfies himself with the popular list.But there are a few plugins one should not miss.Here's a list of firefox extension i have compiled for the general audience of Blogger Whale which is a mixture of bloggers,GTD fans and tech enthusiasts.As in the case of every list you may find some this not applicable or useful for you.Feel free to add your favourites on the 'Comments' section so that i can
include them in the upcoming lists.

1.G Util!-This extension creates a G-icon which stays on the right of the address bar.This G-icon is actually a drop down list of links to all Google services like G-mail,Blogger,Adsense,Analytics,Video etc.So if you are a Google junkie then this one is for you.Get GUtil

2.Scribe fire:ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.Get Scribefire

3.RiteOfTongue:Typos are one of the biggest turn offs in the internet.Avoid typos no matter where you're on the internet with this extension.Right-click on a typed word inside a web form to check if the word is spelt correctly and get alternate suggestions if it is wrong. Then select the word from the popup menu to change it. The words are obtained in real-time over the Internet using the dictionary service from Dict.org.Get Rite of tongue

4.Generate Numly Copyright:Copyright your digital work the web2.0 way.Get Numly

5.Linkchecker:Check the validity of links on any webpage.Useful for bloggers and webmasters.Get Linkchecker

6.Measure it:Anyone who's into designing or photoediting and love light tools will get addicted to this tool.Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.For measuring dimensions of photos for editing you can open images on firefox and get the job done.Get Measure it

7.AccessFlickr!:Access Flickr in blocked countries.Get Access flickr!

8.Firefox Showcase:This one provides a new way to manage your Firefox tabs and windows by showing them as thumbnails in a single window, tab or sidebar. Includes a find bar that will filter the thumbnails, and the capability to select the thumbnails in the same way you would select files in your system.Get Firefox showcase

9.Crash Recovery:Crash Recovery automatically restores all opened pages after a crash happened.Get Crash recovery

10.Save Session:With Save Session, you can choose to save the current session and close Firefox for the next startup.Get Save Session

Did you find this useful.For more useful lists Subscribe to Blogger Whale

SEO quake:A firefox extension for SEO

SEO quake is one useful firefox extension and it's intentionally made for SEO's and webmasters.Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly, save them for future work, compare them with the results, obtained for other, competitive, projects.

You can use it to find out certain parameters such as Google PR (Google PageRank of current page), Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version), Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain)), similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.Overall it is a good product an why not add it to your rack of Firefox extensions.

Copyright your work 'the Web2.0 way' with numly.

Flexibility is Web2.0 is all about.The Web2.0 people[bloggers,digital artists and anyone creating content online]try day and night to make their content more reachable.When we are too much concentrated in making the content mobile,we miss to protect our content.The result is plagiarism.No one can be blamed for this.Copyrighting your every content when your are creating so much is difficult.I was having the same difficulties.When i stumbled upon this firefox extention 'Numly copyright' i felt i found a much awaited solution and considered it important to share with other bloggers too.
Numly copyright is a firefox extension that registers documents and blogs for Numly copyright. Numly Numbers are unique identifiers of electronic media and recognized worldwide by electronic publishing companies and electronic content providers.It's a simple and quick to generate and serve as branded identifier for individuals or companies authoring or distributing electronic content and media.

The amateur account is free and the professional account will cost $4.95 USD / month.
There is one more advantage of using this service.It allows you to track your content
no matter where you post your content.Numly numbers serve as an electronic timestamp of submission. They also allow you to track who is viewing your content and when it is accessed, monitor ratings, and can be used as permalinks.

Download the 'Generate Numly Copyright' firefox plugin
Download the plugin for Wordpress blogs

Save time by using DéjàClick

Firefox addon DéjàClick really frees you from repetitive web work by recording and bookmarking your browser activities, then with a single click replaying the entire sequence all over again.It gives the same features as its popular counterparts which may cost you some bucks.
Its relevance it that it can free you from the repetitive link submission process or
atleast save some time from it.