When tracking how well youre doing against competitors in
Google are you winning, losing or just holding your own?

Dont understand ? Doesnt surprise me.

Most have no clue if theyre winning the Google rankings
battle much less the war. Which is a shame since keeping
score is so simple. Heres all you do.

Identify the Competition
Track Page Rank
Ferret Out How Many Pages in Google
Gauge Both Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
Track Traffic
Keep an Eye on Them

Thats it. Thats all that counts really. Heres how to do it.

** Identify Your Competitors
Not hard. Just identify the top 5 competitors in your niche
you want to outrank.


** Track Page Rank (PR)
Pick the two or three "must-win" keywords you want to come
out on top for.

Use the Google toolbar http://toolbar.google.com to track
the PR of competitors home pages plus the two or three
other pages optimized for those competitive keywords you
picked.

Note the PR of each on a spreadsheet.


** How Many Pages in Google?
Again pretty simple if you have this tool:
http://www.neutralize.com/cmsvp/index.htm

In the left hand column youll see it asks "How well
optimized is your website?"

Now I dont give a rats behind about mine, necessarily.
But I do care about those pesky competitors.

Enter the competitors URL
Stick in some guessimate for how many pages on their page
Hit the "check now" button.

The result will show you how many pages theyve got in
Google, FAST, altaVista, and Inktomi. While I track all of
them - at least track the pages in Google.


** Gauge Quantity and Quality of Inbound Links
Its a cinch if you make use of MSN or HotBot to get the number or
quantity of inbound links since theyre more inclusive.

Google on the other hand will only reveal in bound links
from PR 4 sites or higher. BAM! Theres your take on
quality.

Heres how. Using MSN http://search.msn.com stick:

domainlink:www.competitor.com

in the search box. All pages linking to www.competitor.com
are returned.

Do the identical with Google for higher PR links. Using

hyperlink:www.competitor.com

Record the count of all links plus high quality links on
your spreadsheet. (Be sure to subtract the internal links
from pages in the internet page in question.)


** Track Traffic
Use either Alexas Toolbar http://download.alexa.com or
visit Alexa http://www.alexa.com to grab traffic stats.

While far from perfect since it could be manipulated, you
may still get a decent estimate of visitors as measured by
users with the Alexa toolbar visiting the sites.

To keep it simple just track the traffic rank.

Then to close the loop

** Keep an Eye on Them
Use a page monitoring accomadation to watch competitor sites
like a hawk. Sure some would call this spying. But that
has such a negative connotation. I prefer monitoring. And
heres the free of cost tool to use that makes this automatic.

Change Detect http://www.changedetect.com will email
you whenever a page its monitoring for you changes.

This gives you yet one more way to track if the webmaster
is actively improving their site or asleep at the switch.

Now the easiest way to recognize trends is to graph whats
going on. Youll be able to see right away if the trend is
your friend or not.

Look. Do not be blindsided like a frog in water on the
stove. Who will boil to death because he doesnt detect
whats going on.

** Track your closest rivals.
** Compare your stats to theirs.
** Re-act accordingly.

Its brain friendly and doesnt take more than 20-30 minutes a week
given the tools revealed. Yet doing so gives you the
branding intelligence you absolutely need to improve your Google
ranking or hold your own. No matter what your competitors
are doing.