Before we go into how to (ethically) spy on your competition, you first need to know why would you need these Sherlock Holmes skills in the first place. Why do you need to spy on your competition?

Well, to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to rank well for your keywords for one. Spying on your competition allows you to see why your competitors rank better for certain keywords than you. Why they have a higher PR than you. Why they get more traffic than you. Why they do overall better than you – and how to fix that.

Now that you know why would you want to use the spying techniques, let’s see what all will you achieve by doing this.

You will be able to…

• find the ‘top dogs’ in your niche and what they website URL is
• find your top x keywords that you aren’t using but you should be!
• finding where these top dogs are getting their backlinks and getting some of that for yourself!
• grab some of those top positions as well!

Question is, do we have tools good enough to offer us all of these so we can beat the competition? The answer is: yes, we have! And the good news is, although some have to be purchased, others are for free and you can do all your analysis with the main 3 tools I’m going to describe you here:

The easiest tool of all, of course, is Google.com (or your language equivalent of it). All you need is type in your keywords with ‘exact match’ (in “text”) and you will get on the first page the main competitors for those keywords.

So getting that was quite easy right?

Now on to the next step, finding the top keywords they are using. One of the best – and free – ways to do it is by using the Google Keyword Tool . The only difference is that instead of keywords, you will select here ‘website content’ and then grab the first link from your Google search result and enter the URL there. Now you will see the main keywords that competitor is using. Write them down, and then go on to the next. Rinse and repeat.

Next step is finding the backlinks to their site. Good news is, this tool is also free: the Yahoo Site Explorer. Go to the site, enter your competitor URL and press Explore URL. You will not only see how many pages they are indexed but also who is linking to them! Pretty powerful stuff if you ask me.

Technically all you need to get started are really these 3 free tools. Most of the times this is what I am using.

If I want to make a heaver market research though, I will grab one of the paid tools that really pays for itself 100 times over: SpyFu.com . This website has some free features as well, which I use a lot, but sometimes they are not enough and you might have to resort to buy it in full to unlock its full power.

What is SEO anyway? Most newbies have hears about SEO, but are afraid to ask.

Search engine optimization is the art bringing your site to rank well in search engines (particularly Google) so that when people are searching for the keywords your site is optimized for, they will find it in the SERPS (search engine result pages). Yes, it takes months, if not years, for a site to rank well for the keywords you are trying to optimize your site, so don’t get discouraged if next month you’re still not on page 1. You really need to be patient. Let’s covers some important SEO tips for you.

Make your proper Keyword Research

You need to choose a range of long tail (variations of a main word) and other related keywords, so that when somebody is searching for them, you will be found. Nobody really searches for ‘acne’, but they definitely search for ‘acne natural treatments’. Some topics have a range of keywords that relate to them so you really need to cover them all, including choosing synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning), plurals and other words that people may use to find your site. The more the merrier, I say!

Tracking and Statistics

How can you improve something something if you don’t know what you need to improve. So sign up with Google Analytics and get used to using it on a regular basis. You can also use Awstats in your hosting Cpanel to track where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they are finding your site with and where they are leaving from. I’m using Awstats quite a lot actually.

Emphasize some keywords

You can emphasize certain keywords in your articles and blog posts by making them bold and italics, and also making them headers with the H1, H2 etc tags. This will tell the search engines that these are important words and should be counted as such.

Of course, there are much more than these 3, but these SEO tips should get you started on the right track to SEO your success.