1. Know your competition

Knowing the competition is the key to being able to beat them. If you want to be higher in the search engine rankings you need to know how good your competitors are. There are two main areas where you need to be looking.

a. Keyword research so you can find out who your competition is.

b. analyzing the competitions websites.

If you fail to prepare then prepare to fail. Spending a few minutes doing the research could save you hours of development time later down the line.

Keywords.
Your idea of keywords for your website might not be the same as the visitors you are trying to attract. If we use an example you can see the how the logic works. For the purpose of this tutorial, let's suppose to want a create a website listing your favourite Recipes. I would guess the most popular type of Recipe is a cake Recipe, so lets find out. Open our Keyword Selector tool, (If you search for "Keyword selector tool" at Google the top result is a website called Overture) Once you enter Recipe you will see the most popular searches (correct as of 21st Feb 2006)

1860440 recipe
129037 crock pot recipe
98343 chicken recipe
94243 recipe watcher weight
74658 all recipe
64847 chili recipe
64598 free recipe
59812 cooker recipe slow
58628 appetizer recipe
55320 loaf meat recipe
53320 food network recipe
46367 fat low recipe
44177 food recipe
41726 cake recipe

You will see that Cake Recipe is actually 14th on the list. Each of the results is a link to more suggestions for keywords. Using these keywords you will be able to gather a good list of keywords for your website. Dont choose too many around 40-50 should be ample.

Competitors Website reports.
Next you need to see how the competition fairs. By analysing the competition you can determine how much effort is needed to get ahead. There are two websites I use to do this.

posttrades.com
urltrends.com

These sites will give you valuable information, the important numbers are :-

1. Unique Incoming links
2. Pages Indexed
3. Outgoing links

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1. Know your competition

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