The first thing I do before evaluating and assessing my competition is to find the appropriate keywords for what I'm trying to accomplish. My primary task would be finding a list of keywords related to my search campaign. "Ahh! 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 phase match keyword search query on the Google search engine "or yahoo what ever your preference".

By performing an phase match search query in the Google search box (phase match search query is performed by placing your targeted keywords in quotations) 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 thousands". Next I'll use the all in commands (allinanchor, allintitle and allinurl) to get an idea of my real competition, the ones that actually make reference to the keyword I'm targeting.

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 tool 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.

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