When you analyze a competitors website, you need to make sure you’re prepared to do the job correctly. Competitors’ websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. You can use these sites to analyze your own market. If a site gets a lot of hits it has to be doing something right. Check out where it is ranked, what key words it uses, how it is formatted, and what you can do to exemplify the good and filter out the bad. Also be sure to keep copyright laws in mind as a copyright infringement suit is never good for you, your site, or your blood pressure.

Identifying the Leaders.

You need to start off by identifying the major players – a good place to do this is Yahoo’s directory. It’s not as comprehensive as it once was, but it’s good if you’re looking for the major players. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Look for large companies, as well as innovative approaches and new products. Also use this examination as an attempt to identify the niche markets that the major players have not identified and exploited. If you can find new niches you’re basically set as far as traffic goes.

Also consider that since Yahoo!’s directory is the place that you look to find the big players, it may be a good place to get listed in order to become a big player. These little associations are important if you want to start to attain more and more traffic and conquer a niche or category. Try to identify all places that the big dogs hang out and start hanging out there. It’s all about who you know in this business so bigger is better. You might not be ready to play with the big dogs, but the only way to get there is to sit down and give it a shot.

Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Alexa. Alexa is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic to each sire you visit, telling you whether it’s in the top 100, the top 1000, the top 10,000, and so on. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the pecking order.

Scrutinize the Leaders.

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors website and analyzing them. These are the things that you should look for.

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services they offer, and note anything that’s different from your own offerings. Look for gaps that you could fill.

2. Think about the look, feel and functionality of their website.

3. See what advertising campaigns and offers they’re running.

4. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customer’s point of view.

5. See if you can figure out their strategy.

When you’re dealing with publicly traded companies, you can often get detailed information from their SEC filings. Write down the names of their key players and then look for any interviews and speeches they might have made about their website.

Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps.

Now, summarize the information you’ve found into a few sentences for each competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note strategies that are going to be necessary to counter their offering – these will depend on your own website’s strengths. If you’re small, then you’ll need to be resourceful to exploit their weaknesses.

With this research, you can create a marketing plan. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think you’ll need to take for you site to come out on top. Once you’ve finished analyzing your competitors, you need to consider whether it would be better not to compete at all, and find a less-saturated market.

Don’t get frightened away prematurely, though – make sure you know what you’re getting into before you start, and don’t let big companies intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than they can! All you have to do is offer your customers things they can’t find anywhere else.

In the early days of internet marketing accepting payment for products sold online was a real headache, fortunately for you this is no longer the case and you don't even need a merchant bank account. Over the last few years a number of companies gave positioned themselves as third party credit card processors which allow you to accept payments by credit card at your website for your product or service.

In a typical online purchase your customer will enter their credit card information into a form, and each third party processor has their own particular form (known as a gateway). The third party processor contacts the bank that issued the customer's credit card and the issuing bank approves or declines the transaction based on the information entered into the form. The processor routes the result back to the customers computer screen either as a "purchase declined" message or by passing your customer onto the web page containing your sales fulfillment information.

If the transaction was successful, the customer’s credit card will be billed for the selling price of your niche product or service. This service is not free and you will be charged a set fee for each transaction. The most common third party payment processors are:

1) PayPal (www.paypal.com)

PayPal is owned by eBay the world’s biggest online auction and can be used by customers living in the developed world. Opening a PayPal account id free, but you will need to verify your bank and contact details before being able to use it for accepting payments at your website. There is a fee charged for each transaction and this is automatically deducted from the selling price charged to the customer.

You can link your PayPal account to your bank account which makes it a simple task to transfer the money made from your sales into your account. Your normal banking transaction fees will be charged on this service.

Be careful of using an un-encrypted PayPal payment link on your website as it is a simple task for link highjackers to change the details to their own so they get the money for every sale you make…

PayPal can be easily incorporated into a shopping cart system (i.e. you can sell multiple products at different prices all in one transaction).

2) 2CheckOut (www.2checkout.com)

2CheckOut is a very popular third party payment processor and although there is a small setup fee, they don't charge a monthly fee for their services; they do charge a small fee for each transaction processed. As with PayPal, you can use 2CheckOut with a shopping cart system.

One advantage of using 2CheckOut is you can accept credit cards payments from customers living virtually anywhere. The will transfer money directly into any US or Canadian bank and send a monthly check or Bank Wire to non-US bank account holders.

3) ClickBank (www.clickbank.com)

ClickBank is another similar third party payment processor who have restricted their service to suppliers of downloadable products or internet services. For example, e-books, one time membership fees, software programs etc. To open a ClickBank account there is a small one time setup fee, no monthly fee and you are charged a small fee on every transaction processed on your behalf. You will be sent a check twice a month for all the sales you make during that period.

One major benefit of Using ClickBank for your niche product is you can set up your affiliate program through them and they will automatically pay your affiliates for every sale made on your behalf.

One big disadvantage of using ClickBank is that there is you can't incorporate their payment gateway into a shopping cart system.

4) Digibuy (www.digibuy.com)

Like ClickBank, Digibuy can only be used if you sell digital products or services that can be downloaded, the major advantage of using Digibuy is that you can use a shopping cart with their payment gateway (i.e. you can sell multiple products).

Unfortunately they don't include an affiliate payment system like ClickBank.

Your choice of third party payment processor is going to depend on how many products you sell and whether you intend to run an affiliate program. One extra consideration is some customers will be unwilling to use their credit card on the internet. For these customers you need to decide whether it's worthwhile accepting alternate forms of payment… Some third party payment processors, for example Digibuy, allow you to accept alternate forms of payment through them as default.

Many people wonder how search engines really work. Although the details are complex, this article aims to give you some insight into the process without getting too technical. Read on…

Most search engines have three parts: a crawler, an index, and a search interface. Let's look at each part individually, to get a better understanding of them. Each part has its own role to play in the process, with all the parts working together to make searches possible.

The Crawler.

Also known as a 'spider' or 'bot', this part of the search engine wanders the web, following links and picking up information for its database. Crawlers do most of their work at times of the day when search engines are less busy, but they typically visit frequently updated pages more often. This is something to keep in mind when you're working on your pages. As you may want to perform updates locally and update them when they have been finished rather than updating bits and pieces and hoping that the search engine runs into the correct version.

Also, crawlers ignore some things: your site's code, for example. Your site's title and text - your 'content' - is the most important thing to a crawler. The fastest way to raise your site’s search engine ranking for specific key words is to implement them into your title and your content.

The Index.

Once the crawler has collected all that text, it is then stored and indexed. This allows people searching for keywords and phrases to get results relating to what they were searching for - their search results. Most sites will incorporate rating systems such as Google Page Ranks or Alexa rankings in positioning your site. These ratings are used to attempt to ensure that sites that are important receive more traffic than unimportant sites.

To see this in action, go to a search engine and type in a word. You'll see some text on the page saying something like "results 1-10 of 345,000". This means that the search engine's index contains 345,000 pages it believes are related to the word you typed. If you wanted to, you could look through all these pages to find the information you're looking for.

In order to understand rating systems more thoroughly consider your own site. When you place links on your site you generally due so in order to increase your users understanding of the content of your site. If every site in a particular field links to a particular site, this site is probably very important to that field and should, therefore, be listed highly in the lists of search engine results. Thus the basic ideology of Google Page Ranks.

Consider again, a site that receives a great deal of traffic. If a site is receiving loads and loads of traffic, it probably has some information or service that is very important to its users. Alexa ratings attempt to estimate the amount of traffic that a particular site gets and compare it to the amount of traffic that other sites get. The closer that a site is to the most trafficked site on the internet, the more likely it is to have important content if it is relevant to the search query.

The Interface.

Search engines provide a public interface for users who want to find information on the web. They can type the word or phrase they're searching for, and the interface will run an algorithm to find the pages relevant to their search and display them.

These algorithms are an important part of the SEO (search engine optimization) business, and the search engines are constantly changing them. You'll notice when the algorithms change, as the rankings of your website will change with them.

No two search engines are the same. They all work differently, with their own unique features, and they will all respond to your website in their own way. You should familiarize yourself with the most popular search engines, to better understand how each of them works.

The most popular search engines today include Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. There are many other search engines available, though, and you shouldn't ignore them altogether.

When you submit your website to the search engines, there's no way of knowing when they might add it to their indexes. Since each search engine has its own crawling and indexing methods, you can't be sure how long it might take. In some cases, you might see results within a week, but don't count on it - it may take several weeks or even months before you see anything.

It's not easy to get a high ranking unless you spend some time on it, and learn the proper methods. When you take the time and do some research, you'll find that it's not as confusing as you first thought. Learning the basics will enhance your experience more than you would have thought possible.

We all want to know how keywords affect our rankings, but to find out we’ll need to do a little work. Many say keywords are the key to good search engine rankings, although they aren’t at all the only factor.

If you need a tool to help you decide on your keywords, try Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool – it allows you to test your keyword rankings by showing you statistics on recent searches for them. It’s a great tool when you have no clue which keyword you should choose, as it can give you a list of terms that were recently searched on.

Keyword Density.

Keyword density refers to the number of the keywords contained within your text relative to the amount of text there is. Preferred keyword density ratios vary between search engines, but you should generally try to keep them between two and eight percent (major search engines prefer the lower end). Keyword analysis tools can help to optimize a web page’s keyword density. These tools are good if you’re not sure of what you’re doing, as they’re very intuitive and explain things as you go.

Counting the Keywords.

Many SEO experts will tell you that the keyword density of your text isn’t a very important factor, and that you should be careful not to overdo it. So is there a limit? How many times should you use your keywords? SEO experts won’t be able to answer these questions for you, because no-one’s really sure of the answer. The best answer is that it changes regularly, and you can never be sure – you have to experiment to see what works for you.

Location of Keywords.

When testing the effects of keyword location, we found that pages with the keywords at the top and bottom of the page ranked higher on Google than pages with the keywords in the middle.

Many other search engines also give keywords more or less weight based on their location, but keep in mind that each search engine’s algorithm is different. Here’s a list of how most search engines prioritize keyword positions, from most to least:

1. Domain name.

2. Page title.

3. Headings (i.e. H1, H2, etc.).

4. Body text (the first 2 to 3 KB usually counts more).

5. Meta tags (especially description).

6. Links (including keywords in the URL or link text of links to you).

7. Alt text (the ‘alt’ descriptions for your pictures).

Really, though, keyword density is one of those areas where you’ll have trouble on your hands if you try to second guess the search engines. Be cautious.

A ‘Page Rank’ is a number Google gives to a web page that represents how important Google thinks the page is on the web. When one page links to another, Google considers it to be effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more ‘votes’ there are for a page across the whole web, the more important that page must be. But that’s quite an assumption, isn’t it?

The importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself really is, meaning in Google calculations a page's importance comes from the votes cast for it. These votes are then taken into account when the page is ranked. 

As a general rule of thumb, Google Page Ranks along with Alexa ratings are the best indicators of how well your SEO work has been going. Granted, the ranking that you appear in on the results for your most important key words is the real indicator, but a strong Google Page Rank will help to boost this position substantially. The more links that you have pointing at your site, the better off you are. That’s a basic rule that will apply throughout your SEO operations.

Page Rank matters because it’s one of the most influential factors that determine a page's ranking in Google’s search results. If you want to have good Page Rank, you’d better make sure people are linking to your site. 

Well, don’t jump the gun and try to get your site linked from everywhere you can, because Google doesn’t count every link. They have started filter out links from known ‘link farms’ (sites that are nothing but big lists of links), and being linked to or from these kinds of sites will get you penalized by Google. Be careful out there. They have also implemented a new relevance calculator that (true to its name) tries to determine how relevant the links into and out of your site are. The most important factor here is that Google considers long lasting links as more meaningful than a recently published link.

The best way to increase your page rank is to contact people with relevant and complementary content (that is, content that does not compete with your own but that enhances it). These links are most likely to last and they will not only increase your Google Page Rank, but they will also provide relevant hits via the links themselves.

How is PageRank Calculated?

Google calculates the PageRank PR of all pages it indexes, taking into account all the links to and from each site.  When a page ‘votes’ for other pages by linking to them, it shares out some of its PageRank value amongst these pages.

This algorithm means that a link to your site from a page with PR4 (i.e. a Page Rank of 4) and five outbound links would be worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and a hundred outbound links. It’s not just the Page Rank of the page that’s important, but also the number of links it has.

The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page receives from them. You should also remember that it takes progressively more Page Rank to move up a level. It is generally pretty easy to achieve a Page Rank of three. Once you achieve a Page Rank of four, your site is getting formidable. Increasing past this mark may prove difficult and will require very important content. Reaching 8+ is very difficult. These ranks are usually reserved for sites that are crucial for the functionality of the internet.

Each time you add a link, or a page that links to you adds a link, you run the risk of lowering your PageRank. Make sure that you have as few links as possible, and so do any sites that are associated with you.

Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one site’s PageRank is entirely relative to the others’. You should understand that the results searchers end up with can really only be properly worked out by Google, because they’re the only ones with access to the whole index.