Your Website vs. The Competition, are we ready to compete?
Competition? Most people starting a new website or business
will
acknowledge that they have competition. They may not know exactly
who or
how many competitors there are but they know they are out there.
Not knowing who your competitors are starts you off at a disadvantage. If you are starting a new business and you hope to compete, even in a niche market, why wouldn’t you want to know who your competitors are?
Let’s face it. They have already got the formula right. Their business model is performing. Why not learn from this model. Use this model to improve upon your own.
The two most important considerations in terms of your website vs. the competition are:
1. How your customer/visitor values your site vs the competition.
2. How you rank with the search engines in comparison to your competition.
In terms of the value provided by your website to a customer/visitor, it is all about a quality product, quality content. Ask yourself does your site offer valuable quality? Will a visitor want to return for later needs?
Quality is what counts. Just place yourself in a visitor’s shoe.
You want quality info, a quality product and you want it in a great presentation. No fluff.
Now, even if you have great content and a great product, if no one
can find your website, it won’t matter. How you rank with the
search
engines is very important. Your search engine ranking is based
upon a
number of criteria all determine by search engine spiders.
One of the most overlooked keys to ranking higher are your inbound links or back links. Back links are incoming links to your website or web page. The number of back links is one measure or indication of importance of a website or page as measure by search engines. This measure has a direct relationship to your website’s ranking.
One way to size up your competition and their back link ranking vs. your is with a free tool, Backlinkwatch, http://www.backlinkwatch.com .
This is an excellent tool in that you will be able to see a
competitors back links URLs, anchor text in the back links and the
number of links to their page.
Although I have used Backlinkwatch with the internet explorer I have found that it runs exceedingly faster with Firefox browser. In fact it works best in Firefox browser.
Go to the website. Check it out. Once you have obtained the data, copy and past it into excel and analyze.
Concentrate on the number of links per page, the number of unique domains and what is used as the anchor text. This will go a long way towards explaining what a competitor is doing right and what you also need to do.
