Any business, online or off needs to know what their competition is doing so that they can stay ahead of the game.

It’s not a new practice by any means.  Companies for years have kept close tabs on their competitors but, unlike brick-and-mortar businesses, as website owners we have a much easier way of detecting what our competition is doing; at least online.

Here’s a few tips to get you started:

Google Alerts
Google Alerts allows you to set up your own alert system so that you will be notified whenever someone mentions you, your company, or your products.  However, where it comes in handy for SEO is when you use these alerts to notify you whenever a keyword used in your industry is mentioned in a blog post, on a web page or in a news release.  Additionally, you can also set up Google Alerts to notify you whenever someone mentions your competitors.

Google offers various alerts you can sign up for:

• News alert: A news alert will tell you whenever a phrase you chose has shown up in the latest news articles.
• Web alert: A web alert will show you the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice.
• Blog alert: A Blog alert will show you the latest blog posts that contain your search terms.
• Groups alert: A Groups alert will let you know of any new posts in groups that contain your search term.
• Comprhensive alert: A Comprehensive alert will show you the latest results from many sources allowing you to check out multiple sources at once.

The Internet Archive: You may very well already be familiar with the Internet Archive which shows you year by year and month by month how a website has changed. So why is this important to you and how is it important to SEO?

The Internet Archive allows you to go back and take a look at how your competitors website has changed its content over the years and even find out how often they do so.  You’ll also be able to see what changes have been made to their sales copy as well. Don’t underestimate this very valuable tool!

Search Status Tool: This tool is one that a webmaster should not be without and one that I personally use. This convenient free tool for your Firefox browser shows you at a glance what a webpage’s PageRank is, what their Alexa popularity rank is, where incoming links are coming from via Alexa, a WhoIs search what’s in their meta tags, what kind of keyword density a page is using and more. This is an incredibly useful (and free) tool.  Just remember, you’ll need to be using the Firefox browser in order for this to work for you.