Today I want to touch some more on Keywords and the importance of on page optimization, but I want to talk about some of the tools I use to look at what my competition is doing from an SEO perspective.
Part of the process of researching keywords is finding out about your competition, and the best way to do this is to search for that phrase in Google. Looking past the search result figures which usually dictate our keyword decisions, the top ten ranked sites for that phrase should also be of very high interest. If you have decided on a key phrase and the top ten Google results are dominated with the likes of Mashable, Technorati, Amazon, eBay, to name but a few then obviously you need to leave that key phrase alone, I don’t care who you are- you’re not gonna win THAT race. But if the top ten is taken up with mostly no name websites (so to speak) then there is something that we can learn from them in order to make the most of our own on-page keyword optimization campaign. But we are going to need a bit of help.
When you attempt anything in life it is good to have a mentor or at least the guidance of a more experienced individual, and for some of us online this is a reality, with many marketers offering their mentoring services at a cost, but in the world of niche marketing and Keyword optimization there are ways of getting this guidance, albeit indirectly just by using a few tools and thinking outside the box a little. It’s amazing what is available for free on the internet today and probably the greatest free tool provided to internet users is Google’s Adwords system, incorporating their Keyword Research Tool. Now there are a plethora of paid services available that will get information for you as well, but I’m more interested in getting it free if I can- thankyou very much. So let’s take a closer look at how we can utilise the power of open source to find out what the competition is up to.
SEO Quake Mozilla Firefox plug-in.
The SEO Quake Mozilla Firefox Plug-in is an amazing SEO tool that makes analysing the competition that much easier. After you have installed the plug-in it simply adds an extra information bar under each page result within Google’s Results pages that displays the page rank, Alexa rank, whois link, delicious links, website age and Indexed pages! (and even more). You can also view the sitemap and source direct from the toolbar. What I personally find most useful about this tool is the pagerank and Age of the site are displayed for each site making it easier to do an overall assessment of the ten sites I have to match in the SEO stakes, but for me the greatest feature of this plug-in toolbar is that it displays the no. of Indexed pages within Google, and this information is linked to a listing of all of these pages. Download SEO Quake Here
So How can I best utilise this information?
When you are assessing the top level competitors for your chosen keyphrase it is good to know as much as possible about how they rank and how established they are. This tool allows you to quickly scan the information for each of the top ten results and get all this information in one place. The ability to see all the other pages the site has had indexed in Google is another fantastic way of finding obscure keywords or garnishing some insight into how you should setup your page structure better, for example. The information obtained by SEO Quake really does make assessing the competition so much easier! But once you have assessed this you are going to want to delve deeper into understanding what makes this page so special, and that’s where Google can help.
Install the Google Toobar!
Have you installed it yet? – I took a while to install it because with the plethora of toolbar add-ons I already have I was concerned I would have no room left for the actual page, so I will forgive you this one time. Anyway, to continue with the story, The Google Toolbar is a fantastic addition to your browser that gives you the ability to do a Google search without opening the Google page itself, but it does far more than that, and once you know how to use it correctly you will have the full advantage of knowing what the competition is up to.
Get out your highlighters please.
The Google Toolbar has many of the awesome Google features built straight in including Google Translate, spell checker and bookmarks, but the best feature of all is the highlight and keyword occurrence options.
First things first you need to find the right sort of page to assess because only the small to medium sized sites and blogs will give you the true secrets. Why? Larger sites and authoritative blogs have so many high quality incoming links and such a well established pagerank that the on-page optimization does not have as significant an impact on that particular page ranking in the first place, so the information you garner there will not be as significant, at least not for your SEO enquiries.
Once you have navigated to the page from Google the search term originally used will still be in the toolbar window so when you click on the highlighter button all instances of that search key phrase will be highlighted for your learning pleasure. This is a fantastic way to get some insight into the perfect keyword density and the ultimate keyword placement. Further to this, the Google toolbar breaks the keyphrase up into individual words so that you can search for instances of each single word as well, thus gaining more on-page optimization insight. This alone is enough to get a very good idea of the what and the where of keyword optimization.
There are hundreds more free tools and services available on the web today to help you make your keyword research and SEO campaign a lot easier, but these two tools alone should be more than you need to get started, besides the idea here is to help you out, not throw more confusion at you.
Enjoy.
Alex Whalley is the author of Alex Whalley.com where he writes about blogging, niche site marketing, and keyword research techniques. Alex recently quit his fulltime job to tackle niche marketing fulltime and uses his blog to catalogue and document his experiences with making money with niche sites and search engine marketing. If you’d like to see how easy it is to build, market and monetize niche sites check out his blog. You can also Follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his RSS Feed.
Another awesome post man. You’re really doing a great Job.
Just installed the seoquake.
Keep up the good work. Thanks for sharing this great Post.
~Dev
Dev | Technshare´s last [type] ..How To Find a Niche… And Make Money This Time
I love SEO quake…good stuff. He keeps ringing them up higher and higher.
Hey Dev, Thanks for the support my friend, yeah SEO Quake is an awesome tool to have, especially for the quick top ten assessment.
Thanks for the comments Dev!
One cool trick I found is by using Yahoo Site Explorer to look at where websites are getting their backlinks.
From there, you can jump to these websites and gain your own backlinks. This is really easy because these websites are generally already highly relevant to your own.
Just go through the list, make comment, submit content, etc and you’ll soon build up a lot of backlinks
Murlu´s last [type] ..How To Over-Deliver With Every Blog Post
Hey murray…that’s a great idea also. thank you for sharing it here.
Murlu, That is an awesome additional tip, thanks so much for sharing it with me and the readers!
Thanks for stopping by and commenting Murle. That’s just awesome
Alex´s last [type] ..How to Optimize your site with your Googles on
Murray, that is a fantastic idea. Had to break off to check it out. Thanks for the tip.
Matthew Needham´s last [type] ..How to achieve big results with small steps
Great tips Master Alex!
I love SEO Quake and I use the toolbar as well. Another thing is we can also check (or view) the page source to know what meta tags were used.
Have a good one.
Gines´s last [type] ..Why You Should and Should Not Follow-Up on Comments via Email
You call me a master and you leave additional tips like that!? Really awesome that you stopped by and added that value to the post. See you soon Gine.
I hadn’t heard of SEO Quake, but then again, it seems I’m always learning something new from you, Alex. And today I learned something from Murlu, too. I’m starting to feel like a real smarty pants
Jean Sarauer´s last [type] ..What My Father Taught Me About Blogging
I know! The power of blog commenting in full effect. Thankyou Murlu, and Thank YOU Jean for your ongoing support and words of encouragement. Glad I can teach you something back.
Hi Alex,
I have not heard of that Firefox plugin and it sounds intriguing. Thanks for pointing it out.
I do use the Google Toolbar, but never really thought of using it for word occurrence, but that make sense. It will also make it very easy to count, too.
Thanks so much for the useful information.
Karen
Karen´s last [type] ..Life Is Short, But Not That Short
It is my pleasure Karen, and thankyou my fellow TIP team member for your support and for always being there to comment – regardless (I suppose it makes it easier when I can actually teach you something – woo hoo! I have my moments)
SEO Quake: a tool that makes it all oh-so-easy to analyse data.
Agree Moon, thanks for stopping by and commenting Dude (ette)
I’ve never heard of this plugin, but I’m installing it even as I write this. My issue is, how do I really take the meta information and add it to a blogger website. I thought this causes duplicate tag and description problems.
Lauren´s last [type] ..Heinrich Himmler, Nazi Occultism , and Astrology
Unless everything on your blog is the same as the site you are ‘borrowing’ the meta tags from, you are not going to get penalized. On that note, there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, I proved that unequivocally during an experiment I ran on my blog.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting Lauren, the SEO Quake plugin is a really handy tool for assessing the comp quickly. Enjoy
Go Alex, Go Alex…go …go …go.
Brandon
LOL, the comment came to my email slightly different, and I liked it more too. It said:
Author: theinfopreneur
Comment:
Go Alex, Go Alexa…go …go …go.
hah, go Alexa (rank) indeed
Alex´s last [type] ..How to Optimize your site with your Googles on
Hee.
Yeah, little typo I had to correct.
B
Love the look of SEO Quake, gonna go and download right now.
Another great post….keep it up.
cheers,
Schmidty
Hey Schmidty, thanks for your comments and support my friend, glad you are enjoying the posts and hope to see you next week (although you can always pop into my place if you want
)
Alex´s last [type] ..How to Optimize your site with your Googles on
Great post man!
I absolutely love the SEO Quake plugin!
CJ
CJ’s last blog ..Could You Make Over a Million a Year Blogging?
Hey CJ! Thanks man!
Love your energy (and it’s text for pete’s sake!)
Awesome man.
Thanks for commenting man.
great information, look forward to reading more from you. I’ve been using some great tools in Chrome and some other outside tools.
Dave Woodson´s last [type] ..Think Provider
Hey Dave, thanks for your awesome comments and feedback.
What tools are you using in Chrome out of curiosity? Because I know that SEO Quake is now available for Chrome. (at least it proudly tells me every time I start Mozilla – what is that?)
Have a great day Dave.
Thanks for the great tips!
Downloaded SEO Quake – reveals a ton of details.
Love your hacker image. Fits perfectly with the post.
Toronto Dentist´s last [type] ..Dental Sins and Dentists to Avoid – Pain Exploiters II
Hey Dentist dude.
No worries for the tips my friend, thought I would give you the ‘wisdom’ before you took it. (Ok that was a bad pun, but I’m leaving it there because secretly I like it)
Thanks for stopping by TheInfopreneur.
Alex
Alex´s last [type] ..Keywords 101: The Keyword Thesaurus.
Thanks for the tips Alex. I just downloaded SEO Quake and it looks the goods.
Always picking up great info here at TIP.
Callum´s last [type] ..Member’s Area
Hey Callum, no worries my friend, it ‘s a great tool.
Yeah TIP is the bomb (what is that?!?) I mean yeah TIP is awesome! Brandon Rocks!
Alex´s last [type] ..Keywords 101: The Keyword Thesaurus.
SEOQuake rocks, thanks for that!
Jorgen @ Personal Branding´s last [type] ..Why You Should Rearrange Your LinkedIn Profile Sections
Superb post Alex. What a great second post. I think I’ve said before that I’m no expert at this. I guess I need to start spending some more time on this as I think there’s awesome potential here.
Could be good for you to do a site review for SEO optimisation and then suggest what needs to be changed to increase hits or natual search.
Matthew Needham´s last [type] ..How to achieve big results with small steps
Hey Matthew, thanks for the comments my friend.
Yeah I love keyword research because as far as marketing goes, nothing beats the ROI you get doing it, so little effort for such long term gain.
Probably would be a good idea to do a full site review, but then I’d be giving away ALL my secrets LOL
Alex´s last [type] ..Keywords 101: The Keyword Thesaurus.
Recently I had a great deal of difficulty installing a Sitemap on my blog, largely because I’m not one for doing or messing with code, and the such like. But based on your well written essay here I installed SeoQuake Addon for Firefox, the gadget however is telling me that I don’t have a Sitemap on my blog ?
I wrote to a friend about this occurrence and he wanted to know where I “can check where seoquake is picking up the site map from (or not).?” I’m therefore hoping you may shed some light on this dilemma ?
pcd2k´s last [type] ..WaveRoller concept video/animation
Hi Alex,
I’ve got the SEO quake installed. Thanks!
Your last paragraph holds the power to your post. SEO to me is all confusion.
I like baseball cards, they are all cool, but I’m not a collector. I just need one or two to make me rich! Same thing with SEO. I just need one or two tools to get me there.
Thanks Alex!
Jeffrey Morgan´s last [type] ..Bloggers Market – 30-000 Uniques A Month
I love simple and by recommending two tools out of a collection of hundreds you have made this simple (well, simpler at least). Thanks Alex.
Michael Pedzotti´s last [type] ..You alone are destined for failure
Hahaha, True That Michael!
I am actually writing my ebook as we speak and keep adding more and more pages and then relook at it and promptly delete them.
As you said it’s about simplifying the processes not the other way around
Alex Whalley´s last [type] ..Article Marketing – Part 1 What’s a Search Engine
I use SEO Quake but not yet use it as like what you mention in this article. It seems worthy to try since I blog about blogging which is very crowded. I must spy my competitor.
Dana @ Blogging Tips Blog´s last [type] ..The Complete List Building Method Free Video
Hey Dana,
Yeah the blogging niche is certainly a crowded one, and probably the best niche to get the SEO advantage in.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting, glad you found the post helpful
Alex Whalley´s last [type] ..Article Marketing – Part 1 What’s a Search Engine
Hey Alex,
Is that a picture of you in the ski mask? Love it!
I had not heard of SEO Quake, but will likely have it installed before you read this. Then I am going to key research blog and I am going to find out what you have really been up to.
Have a great day
mark´s last [type] ..5 Myths About Goal Setting
Yeah, we got a pic of Alex getting ready to go trick or treating.
Gawd mark, get the anchor text right.. sheeesh.
LOL, all good my friend, it’s the thought that counts after all, and I hope you have it installed now.
Alex Whalley´s last [type] ..Article Marketing – Part 1 What’s a Search Engine
Aaahhh yes! I love SEOQuake! Such a wealth of information at your fingertips. =)
I especially like it for determining keyword density.
Great post Alex!
Michele Welch´s last [type] ..That’s A Wrap- November 5- 2010