Getting Traffic to Your Website by Snooping

Researching the competition is a great help for getting traffic to your website.  You don’t need any black hat tools to snoop on your competitors; you just need to know the options that are available.  Here are some great tricks for finding out what the other guys are up to.

Researching Backlinks on Your Competitors’ Websites

The search engines have a really nifty tool for researching backlinks to your competitors’ websites.  All you have to do is type “link” before their URL in the search box, and they will generate a list of sites that backlinked to their website.

This information is useful since you’ll not only see how many backlinks they have but also where they’re coming from.  If you know where the links are coming from, you now have targeted sites from which to get your traffic.  Even if you don’t exceed their traffic by doing this, you can at least increase your traffic and diminish theirs.  Just be honest and professional to the webmasters when you e-mail them, or you could be summarily ignored.

Use SEO Tools to Evaluate the Competition’s Site

SEO Tools such as SEO Quake are a great way to get the dirt on the opposition.  They can provide the Google Page Ranking, Alexa Ranking, Index, Bing Ranking, Yahoo Ranking—virtually everything you could want to know about what the other guys are doing that you’re not.

They appear as a toolbar on your browser, giving the “skinny” on immediate view.  Once you click on a number, you can get a more detailed report on the specific criteria.  Rumor had it at one point that using these tools could get you de-indexed.

I have to question that logic since Internet Explorer and Firefox have it as an available add-on, as does Google Chrome.  Furthermore, SEO Quake, for example, is still being distributed without any black hat label attached.  The idea that you may be de-indexed is just a little paranoia, it would seem.

Collecting the Competition’s Website Info

Most web browsers have options where you can look at website info called Page Source and Page Info.  You can use these on your competition’s website and find a wealth of information about what they’ve done on site to get their ranking.  You can see the code they’re using, and this is advantageous for several reasons.  Tags for photos and videos can reveal keywords.  Other tags can show that they’re using SEO techniques that you aren’t.

These are just a few of the things you can do to get the jump on your competitors and draw more traffic to your website.  What you discover about their websites can not only be duplicated, but you can also find ways to out-do them.  Do they have a lot of backlinks?  Get more.  Are their keywords better than yours?  Find better ones.  Things like that are essential to be the top dog in your niche.