Internet Spying 102

Having an edge over your competition is probably one of the most important things any company can have, whether that is a better product or better service.  Making money with your internet business can be made a LOT easier if you know what your competitors are up to.

Okay, registering with the search-engines is a good start, but that really should count as ‘Class 101′ because that is the first thing you should do to start the progress of your sites march up the rankings.  You need to be a little sneakier though.

Here are a few nice techniques you can use to find out what the other players in your field are doing.

The “top secret” algorithms that Google and Yahoo use to rank your site include weight given to links from OTHER websites back to your site.  Their logic?  Well, if OTHER websites think you’re site is relevent, then so do they!  AND the more links that each of THOSE sites have, then the more “weight” they carry.

So, let’s look into linking.  One of the best snooping tools in the world is…………………GOOGLE.  After all, Google is ALL about information indexing right!  Here’s how you can use Google (or Yahoo if you prefer) to get the “skinny” on your competition.

Firstly, to find out if YOUR site is listed in a particular search-engine, which it should be because you registered it with them, simply type your full domain name/URL into the search box (including the www.). If you ARE registered with them, then a result will appear (or hopefully several results).

Okay, now try typing into the search box site:YOUR WEB ADDRESS (that’s YOUR address) this will give you a list of all of the pages that the search-engine has been able to find indexed for your site.

Now if you can get this information for YOUR site, then you can get it for your competitors sites also!  Good information to have, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The next trick you might want to use is to type link:YOUR WEB SITE into the search box.  Now you’ll see how many sites are linking TO your site.  Again, if this works for YOUR website, it’ll work for your competitors sites also.  Once you see who is linking to them, you can CONTACT these other sites and suggest a link-trade with them! They link to you and you link to them. Great for building links back to your site, even though Google doesn’t give as much ‘weight’ to these ‘reciprocal’ links as they would a one-way link directly to your site

Now, Google and Yahoo are both quite fussy in what they term a “link”, so to get a true number of links, go to ‘alltheweb.com’ and do the same thing.  You’ll now see a much more extensive list of who is linking to your site, but more importantly, who is linking to your competitors sites.

Finally, you can try using Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) to find out how your competitors are doing in the rankings.

So, if you want to make more money online (and who doesn’t), practice a few of these techniques regularly and watch your rankings improve dramatically.

Luke.