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This is the third in a series of tools which can not only be used to help improve your website, but also used to analyze the sites of your competitors.

In todays article I look at two desktop based applications.  One is a complete site analysis and optimization tool while another is a good link analysis and management tool.

Both of these tools should go into your arsenal of web tools to help improve your sites search engine positioning while also allowing you to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.

WebCEO

I’ve only just started to use this tool but I must say I’m impressed with the variety of detail one can get from it.

I started using it to analyze my own sites and was impressed with the reporting. However I find the most impressive part of the package is the link analyzer which gives you the ability to not only analyze your sites or those of your competition, but also compare the links of the sites.

For example I compared two of my sites against each other. Both are in a similar industry but one has been around for much longer than the other.

The link analysis took over ˝ an hour but from it I learned some valuable things.

For one thing, there are a few links which both sites share. In other words, an external site has a few pages which links back to both of my sites.

I can even drill down in this report to see which pages link to my sites, and how many links per domain each of the sites is getting.

This can be an incredibly powerful tool, should you need to analyze and compare your competitions links to your own.

Not only will you find similar linking patterns – that is pages that link to your site and that of your competition, but you will also find some other areas from which you can request links.

This tool also offers you the ability to perform keyword research.  It can retrieve search volumes from multiple sources and even show you the currently ranking sites for those key phrases.  In addition, on the Google SERPs the program adds the URL’s PageRank to the page giving you a comprehensive snapshot of the top ranking sites.

The tool also has a pretty decent site page analyzer.  It can look at your page and make some basic recommendations for optimizing it to better target keywords.

Finally, the site auditor produces data similar to Xenu, which I wrote about yesterday but it also generates a fairly comprehensive report showing you areas for improvement on the site as a whole.

As a site improvement tool to use on your own it is an exceptional tool.  But as a competitive analysis package it is equally impressive.

From analyzing and comparing links, to site audits and keyword suggestions, this tool can help you find those smaller areas of the competitors site which you can exploit.

For example, if the site auditor finds orphaned pages, perhaps you can build or improve the linking to similar pages on your own site. This could help boost their rankings ahead of the competitor.

Simillarly, you can find additional links for your site which the engines have deemed worthy for your competitor.

Finally, you can use the tool to analyze their keywords to see if there are any phrases there you should also be targetting.

Opti-Link

This is a tool that I quit using for some time, but have since begun to realize the value of again.

Basically what it does is allows you to analyze the links pointing to a domain.

Not only can it show you who links to your site (or the sites of your competitors) but it even shows you the anchor text (the text found on the link) as well as the page title. 

This is a great tool to use to find those quality pages which link to your competitors and from which you should also try and obtain a link.

And since you can view the page title of the page linking to your competitors, you can get a pretty good idea of which pages you need to consider for links and which you don’t.

For example, if you and your competitor both sell widgets, and upon analyzing your competitors links you find there are a few that have page titles containing widgets, then it’s a pretty safe bet that the page is about widgets.  Your next step would be to review the page(s) and see if they are related.  If so, then you need to see if you can request a link.  If not you can move on to the next widgets page.

If, on the other hand, you find links from the website designer, or a personal blog, or something unrelated to widgets, you can safely exclude those links from your “for further review” section.

I’m sure if you were to run your top 10 competitors through this tool you’d be able to find a bunch of quality pages to request links from.

The only drawback with this program is that the demo version is limited to only querying hotbot for 10 links.

But as a demo you can get a pretty good idea of what it will do, allowing you to decide if it’s worth the investment to get the full version.

In conclusion...

It should be pretty obvious over the past few days that I’m trying to show that not only are there lots of free tools out there to help you improve your site’s search engine positioning, but these tools can also be used to analyze competitors sites to expose weaknesses or flaws, as well as outline areas in which you can implement improvement on your site.

A while back I attended a search engine strategies conference and I remember SEO being referred to as warfare.  And while some of the stuff I’ve talked about over the past few days seems to be that, it does help in the end.

The better you know your competitors, the more prepared you will be when they attempt a change, and the more quickly you will be able to respond.

So while some of this stuff may seem nitpicky (ie analyzing links to specific deep pages, and attempting to link to your own pages, or moving your own deeper pages to shallower locations to make them rank better) overall everything I’ve suggested in these past few days are done to help improve your site.

I can also tell you that I’ve dealt with, or currently deal with, clients that are in such competitive markets that such tactics are one of the only things helping them retain their #1 rankings.  They understand that their SEO isn’t done in a vacuum and that while they are using effective SEO tactics, their competitors are also.

And that includes detailed competitive analysis like I’ve explained here.

Be sure to review my past 2 articles on this topic:

Using Domain Exploring, WHOIS and Alexa

and

Yahoo! Site Explorer and Alexa

Rob Sullivan
Text Link Brokers