The first thing I do before find my competition is finding the appropriate keyword for what I'm trying to accomplish. My primary task is finding a list of keywords. "To find a keyword" There are many ways to go about this task. But the easiest and time permissive way to me is the keyword tool at SEO Book.com. This tool allows me to get a nice gauge at what keywords are within my competitive range, it also gives me list of keywords that can be the starting point for an effective organic search campaign. When I find a list of keywords, I like to give each one a score by relevancy. How the keyword fits in to my over all goals is how I normally judge a keyword's relevancy, for example if my goal is lead generation or sales, each keywords are assigned a different value, There are many marketing e books online that will help you with this task if you are a newbie. After narrowing my keyword list to keywords that are conducive to my overall goal, I now need to find the competitive value of each keyword.

The main goals that I try to accomplish when finding a keyword's competitive value, is to find out how many websites are competing for the top position and how many links bearing that keyword would it take me to start ranking on the first page in either the top 3 positions. There are many organic search marketing software and tools online that can help in accomplishing this task, but to me the most time appropriate method is to perform an exact match keyword search query on the Google search engine "or yahoo what ever your preference".

By performing an exact match search query you can find out how many site are competing with yours for a specific keyword by seeing how many search results are returned, "My targeted keywords are normally with the range of the low hundred thousands". My next step will be to find out how many back links would it take for me to reach the first 3 position. I accomplish this task by using the tool SEO for Fire Fox this tool allows me to see a wide range of statistics that's useful to my everyday Search Optimization tasks; more importantly it affords the ability to perform a back link analysis. I can see how yahoo links are indexed for a particular website. "For the Google index I simply use the link: command".

This brings me to the meat and potatoes of it all, I want to see what anchor text the top 3 competing site are using and where those link are coming from, again there are many tools on the internet to accomplish this task, but we are looking for the method newbie's and experienced marketers alike can easily perform that is time management friendly. I accomplish this task with the anchor text analysis too at Best Rank.com. This tool allows to see what anchor text the competitor is using, where the link are coming from, what's the follow status and ever the page rank of the page that the link is coming from. These are some simple tactics to perform a simple competitive analysis hope it was helpful. Please join me for my ten days of link building series.