How to Steal SEO secrets from your competition!

Here are a few tips I found searching the web.

SEO Quake Mozilla Firefox plug-in.

The SEO Quake Mozilla Firefox Plug-in is an amazing SEO tool that makes analyzing the competition that much easier. After you have installed the plug-in it simply adds an extra information bar under each page result within Google’s Results pages that displays the page rank, Alexa rank, whois link, delicious links, website age and Indexed pages! (and even more). You can also view the sitemap and source direct from the toolbar. What I personally find most useful about this tool is the pagerank and Age of the site are displayed for each site making it easier to do an overall assessment of the ten sites I have to match in the SEO stakes, but for me the greatest feature of this plug-in toolbar is that it displays the no. of Indexed pages within Google, and this information is linked to a listing of all of these pages. Download SEO Quake Here

So How can I best utilize this information?

When you are assessing the top level competitors for your chosen key-phrase it is good to know as much as possible about how they rank and how established they are. This tool allows you to quickly scan the information for each of the top ten results and get all this information in one place. The ability to see all the other pages the site has had indexed in Google is another fantastic way of finding obscure keywords or garnishing some insight into how you should setup your page structure better, for example. The information obtained by SEO Quake really does make assessing the competition so much easier! But once you have assessed this you are going to want to delve deeper into understanding what makes this page so special, and that’s where Google can help.

Install the Google Toobar!

Have you installed it yet? – I took a while to install it because with the plethora of toolbar add-ons I already have I was concerned I would have no room left for the actual page, so I will forgive you this one time. Anyway, to continue with the story, The Google Toolbar is a fantastic addition to your browser that gives you the ability to do a Google search without opening the Google page itself, but it does far more than that, and once you know how to use it correctly you will have the full advantage of knowing what the competition is up to.

Get out your highlighters please.

The Google Toolbar has many of the awesome Google features built straight in including Google Translate, spell checker and bookmarks, but the best feature of all is the highlight and keyword occurrence options.
First things first you need to find the right sort of page to assess because only the small to medium sized sites and blogs will give you the true secrets. Why? Larger sites and authoritative blogs have so many high quality incoming links and such a well established pagerank that the on-page optimization does not have as significant an impact on that particular page ranking in the first place, so the information you garner there will not be as significant, at least not for your SEO inquiries.

Once you have navigated to the page from Google the search term originally used will still be in the toolbar window so when you click on the highlighter button all instances of that search key phrase will be highlighted for your learning pleasure. This is a fantastic way to get some insight into the perfect keyword density and the ultimate keyword placement. Further to this, the Google toolbar breaks the keyphrase up into individual words so that you can search for instances of each single word as well, thus gaining more on-page optimization insight. This alone is enough to get a very good idea of the what and the where of keyword optimization.

There are hundreds more free tools and services available on the web today to help you make your keyword research and SEO campaign a lot easier, but these two tools alone should be more than you need to get started, besides the idea here is to help you out, not throw more confusion at you.
Enjoy.