@Matt_SiltalaPubcon South 2010

I Am Brand New To All Of This - Where Do I Start?

• Hubs - Find and Identify the “easy ones”. Places to find content ideas, links, sites that will help with keyword research and sites linking to more than one competitor.

• Anchor Text - Find and Identify everything there is to know about how the competition ranks for the words they do.

• Unique Domains Linking In - Find and Identify to get a better idea of the work that is ahead of you to get equivalent rankings.

• Strong Content - Find and identify the strongest pages of competitors.

• Social Media - Where and What are your competitors doing with social media

• Track - Monitor, track & keep a close eye on your competition.

@Matt_Siltala

Hubs - The Easy Ones To Snoop

• Press• Review Sites • Forums • Local• Answer Sites• Article Websites• Social Media

@Matt_Siltala

Press• Press - How is the competition using press? This can help generate ideas by keeping up with trending opportunities,

linking opportunities, as well as seeing how the competition is using press for SEO, social marketing etc.

http://trendwatching.com/ is a great resource for learning about trend watching.

@Matt_Siltala

Search For Review Sites• Review Sites - Where are your competitors getting talked about? Who is writing

about them? How are these reviews getting done? Blog Posts? Videos? Images?

The way you search makes a difference!

You now know where your site is getting their products reviewed, and what is being said.

@Matt_Siltala

Forums• Forums - Find out ideas, topics and what people are discussing

(competitors are doing) in your industry.

What are people talking about? What can you learn? Can you find any opportunities?

@Matt_Siltala

Local• Local - What, if anything, are your competitors doing LOCAL wise? Do some research, and

learn how to gain valuable citations that will help you dominate local search!

@Matt_Siltala

Answer Sites• Answer Sites - Another great way to research and come up with content ideas from

competitors. **Most are no-followed, but are a great source of traffic from my experience.**

Do a search for your competitors domain name, see if they are using any “answer” type websites. What are they answering, what questions are being asked about your industry? @Matt_Siltala

Article Websites• Article Websites - Another great way to keyword research, generate content ideas, and see

how they are using these sites (and how many of them) for link building.

You can then go to each article site and do a search for the URL, and see what they are posting, what keywords they are going after (by anchor text) and how many articles, links etc. they have.

@Matt_Siltala

Social MediaTwitter is just the example, but what are your competitors doing on social networking sites? Are the running ads/contests/discounts etc. on Facebook? Are they creating content that will do well on major social websites?

@Matt_Siltala

Anchor Text & The Allinanchor: Search Operator

Allinanchor: This search operator is still important for researching the competition because it shows the sites that have high number of inbound links with specific keywords. This helps you keep a better eye on your progress as well as snooping on how the competition is doing.

@Matt_Siltala

Search Operator

You now know which sites are doing the best job with their anchor text (and what keywords they are going after) so its time to see where they get all their links from!

@Matt_Siltala

Now that you know the sites that are on top by using “allinanchor:”, you can do a search with those sites and the keywords that you are targeting to get a better idea of places to find links, and why the competition ranks.

@Matt_Siltala

ALSO: You can now start to compare the top sites, and gain valuable information (including top keywords) from sites like Compete.com

@Matt_Siltala

If you use tools that are available to you (and FREE), like the SEO For Firefox Tool (by Aaron Wall of SEOBook), You can get very exciting site comparison data.

@Matt_Siltala

Intelligence Gathering Tools• Compete• SEO For Firefox SEOBook• Linkscape (@joannalord paid me)• Alexa• Trellian• Quantcast• Hitwise• SpyFu (spy on PPC too)

@Matt_Siltala

Unique Domains Linking In

• Use these same tools to help you find out how many unique domains are linking to the competition. This will give you a better idea for link building and how much effort you are going to have to put in.

@Matt_Siltala

Strong Content• What pages of the competition are getting the

most traffic? What pages have the most links going to them? How can you tell which pages are doing the best on social media sites?

• How is the Technical SEO/Page Structure of their content? Titles, Meta, Alt & Header Tags etc.

@Matt_Siltala

The easiest option is to use the SEO For Firefox tool to gather this data by doing a site: search in Google. This will tell you what pages/content are doing the best. Its obvious what you would then do with that kind of data!

Data for: Digg, Delicious, SU, Twitter and more! Great for researching STRONG content!

@Matt_Siltala

Yahoo Site Explorer• You can get valuable information about who is linking to a specific site OR page with YSE.

You can then use this data to give you ideas of creating even better content!

@Matt_Siltala

Google Search Operators• Google has many Search Operators that you can use to research the competition, find great

sources for links, and do some pretty intensive competitive analysis - and its all FREE!

The source of these Search Operators can be found here: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html With an explanation of each operator and what it will do for you. All great and worth the time it takes to research. Highly recommend!

@Matt_Siltala

Resources For Social Media

•Social Media For Firefox•Knowem•Who’s Talkin•Twitter Search/Lists•Image Search•SEO For Firefox (again)

@Matt_Siltala

Track•Trackur•Google Alerts•TweetBeep•Quitter•TrackEngine•WhatThatPage•BuzzStream•GigaAlert (best, not free)•Set RSS In Google News

@Matt_Siltala

Matt SiltalaDream Systems Media, Owner

http://www.dreamsystemsmedia.com@Matt_Siltala on Twitter