Friday, January 28, 2005

The Importance Of Competitive Intelligence

Are you keeping tabs on all of your competitors -- or do you just ignore them and hope they go away?  You need to be watching your competition closely and studying their websites for every clue that can help your own site improve.  Who links to them?  How many links do they have?  What meta tags are they using?  What software are they using to build their sites?  What is the Google pagerank and Alexa ranking of all their pages?  Why do their pages rank so high compared to yours?

If you don't know the answers to these questions, you are leaving money on the table every day. 

One excellent tool that will help you with your competitive research is this plugin for the Firefox browser.  This tool displays pagerank, Alexa rank, backlinks listed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, meta tags, robots.txt file contents, pages listed in major search engines, and much more.  All of this information is available to you with just one right-click of your mouse while viewing your competitor's web pages. 

If you don't currently use Firefox as your main browser, you should switch immediately -- the value of the hundreds of available plugins is too much to ignore, both as time savers and contributors to your business bottom line.

 


11:24:36 AM  #