Research Tools for Competitor Analysis

We need some research tools for doing competitor analysis for many reasons. It could be to find out the competitor in the Industry or even to know where are you standing in the bunch. Their are many competitor analysis tools, some free tools to help you look at what you are looking for. Lets look at some of the best competitor tools on web:

1. Alexa : is a free tool and gives you a brief analysis of your competitor traffic. You can check your website traffic and compare with that of your competitors.

2. Seobook Firefox Plugin : One of the best tool I would say for doing Competitor Analysis. Its free and you can use it as a firefox plugin. This tool check various factors of a webpage like site back links, .edu links, .gov links, age of the site, number of links from blog through Technorati and etc.

3. Compete : Compete has both free for basic and paid for advance. This is a great tool that can provide a statistical comparison of up to 5 different websites. Excellent for competitor analysis but the final data should be taken with a grain of salt because Compete can only produce stats on the limited data available.

4. Check Server Headers Tool : This is a free tool of Stepforth.com. A slightly technical this tool valuable insight into the setup of yours or your competitor’s servers. For example, StepForth uses this tool to verify that our clients have properly set up their server redirects (301’s) so that duplicate content issues are avoided. It is also used extensively within our competitor analysis reports; it is useful to see how your competitors might have an edge over you.

5. Xenu Link : This is a free tool. Please see the video below which explains about how effectively this tool can be used for SEO.


6. Domain Tools : Domain Tools is one of my favorite sites for competitor analysis. Its a free too. The most useful component, the Reverse IP Tool, allows me to plunk in a single competitor’s domain and then see every other website that is hosted on its server. In rare instances where the co-hosted domains are owned by the competitor I can get a hint at any future marketing plans my clients should be made aware of.

7. Robots.txt Syntax Checker : There is nothing worse than making an error in a Robots.txt file and accidentally dropping a site out of the search engines. The free Robots.txt checker will review your Robots.txt file; ensuring it is properly created and it will provide you with the rules within the file in plain language to ensure everything meets your approval. This is a valuable tool for avoiding serious indexing issues.

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Behavioral Targeting - for Effective Online Advertising

“Behavior is anything that indicates interest. It’s profile targeting.” —Jeff Hirsch, president,
Revenue Science. Behavioral Targeting is now the crucial factor in online advertising. This is a technique which can increase conversions or effectiveness of any campaign.

"Behavioral targeting segments the audience based on observed and measured data—the pages or sites users visit, the content they view, the search queries they enter, the ads they click on, the
information they share on social Internet sites and the products they put in online shopping carts.This data is combined with the time, length and frequency of visits. Recency counts a lot, too— data from two weeks ago is far less accurate at predicting interest than that from two days ago." - According to eMarketer

Behavioral targeting can be broadly segregated in to 2 categories.

1) Identifying customers by category: Identifying the customers and sending them to the relevant category they belong to. For example, If a visitor visits a News portal, and he is looking for news on travel industry in India, sending him to the relevant category and placing your ads relating to travel industry in India. This would be more effective method of relevancy for ads, and their are higher chances of the ads to convert at a low rate.

2) Contextual Targeting : This method of advertising is the most successful among all other methods of behavioral targeting. In this method, you select a specific set of keywords that you look to advertise and your ad will appear for such keywords. Google has definitely dominated in this industry. Their are many other players in the market like Tacoda ( acquired by AOL), Revenue science and etc.


Below is the diagram that shows that types of adtargeting that are effective.


Also see below the best performing online advertising tactics according to the US online marketers

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Search Engine Marketing - The Spending trends and the Boom

I was going through this article in Economic times.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Internet_/Search_engine_marketing_poised_for_boom/articleshow/3418823.cms . It is a good article and has raised hopes for future of Search Marketing in India.

Let us look at the what are the four Pillars of Search Engine Marketing:

Paid Search Advertising : are the ads that appear on the search engines results page, beside the natural Listing. You can find them as Sponsored links in Google, Sponsored results in Yahoo and Sponsored sites in MSn.

Search Engine Optimization : is also called as natural or organic listing is a kind or search marketing where, the websites are listed on the basics of certain factors like, Meta tag's Content, external links to the site, site navigation and etc.

Paid inclusion : This normally means the amount that you spend to get your site listed in any director or a search engine to crawl.

Contextual Advertising : mainly refers to the text ads that appear on third party websites. Google dominates even hear. Quigo is catching up faster after AOL acquired Quigo. The other publishers are Industry brains, advertising.com, MSN, Yahoo and etc.


The below is the research done by IAMAI on Search marketing trends in India.
http://www.iamai.in/Upload/Research/sem%20report_24.pdf

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