Now that you’ve identified your top search competitors, it’s time to go behind enemy lines to do some spying on your site’s search competition.
This sort of spying has become a part of the web’s culture and is quite common in SEO. Since the inception of search engines, webmasters have been spying on each other’s sites in order to try to get an edge in the search rankings.
When spying on your competition, it is important to know that while you can see the website’s front-end, there is a great deal of information available behind the scenes that you weren’t intended to see (pages titles, meta information, domain owner, etc). There are many tools & techniques that you can use to spy on your competition:
Viewing Page Source
This method is probably the simplest way to get a quick sneak peek at your competitor’s site. Source is short for source code, which is simply the HTML content that tells a browser what information to display on the user’s screen.
By viewing a webpage’s source, you have access to not only the viewable elements, but the site’s invisible elements. This includes meta tags, alt tags, etc. However, if you aren’t familiar with HTML code, then this may be a bit perplexing for you at first.
How to view source in your browser:
- In Internet Explorer, select View > Source from the menu.
- In Firefox, select View > Page Source from the menu.
- In Safari, select View > View Source from the menu.
The Google Toolbar
The Google Toolbar is an extremely popular tool among normal searchers and SEO pros alike. The Google Toolbar is a free add-on to your browser (IE or Firefox) that provides you with very useful information about the websites you visit. Download the Google Toolbar.
For SEO purposes, the Google Toolbar allows you to get a quick view of a site’s Google PageRank. In short, Google PageRank is a number value between 0/10 that it assigns to web pages based on a myriad of search factors (which I will not get into here). Basically, the higher the Google PageRank, the more trusted the site is by Google.
Firefox Extensions
If you use mostly Firefox, then you most likely already know that there are many great extensions out there at your fingertips. Here are two extensions that I’ve tried out personally and love the information that you get from them.
SEOQuake – This tool displays a myriad of important search data within the SERPs.
SEO for Firefox – This tool, created by Aaron Wall of SEO Book, displays a large number of SEO factors within your site’s toolbar.
Alexa Data
The Alexa database can provide you with tons of useful information about your search competitors such as s screenshot of the homepage, traffic statistics, inbound link quanitity, site owner & contact info, site age, related links, etc.
Many SEOs have serious reservations about the accuracy of Alexa data. However, it is a great way to gather so nice general information about a competitor site.
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