Successful companies know what their competitors are up to at any moment. They use their knowledge of the competition to help develop a strategy for crushing them. How well do you now your competition? Here are 5 things your can learn from your competitors to better prepare your business to compete with them in the online market.

1. Keywords they are targeting- Understanding which keywords your competitors are targeting gives you a clearer idea of how competitive your industry is online. This isn’t to say you should directly lift your competitors’ keywords, but knowing the phrases they think customers are typing into the search engines is important because it allows you to create a well rounded keyword list. Perform your own keyword research on their key phrases to determine which phrases are worth using.
2. Keywords they aren’t targeting- Even more important than the keywords your competition is targeting are the ones they aren’t. One easy way to do this is to enter the urls of your competition into the Google Adwords keyword tool. The tool will then suggest additional keywords for those sites to target. Find the most effective keywords that they aren’t currently using on their website, and you will be able to make a splash on the SERPs.
3. Who’s linking to them- Many website owners say link building is the hardest part of their internet marketing efforts. A good place to start your link building campaign is to study your competitor’s inbound links. I prefer using Yahoo as an easy way to look at backlinks. Simply enter linkdomain:www.yourcompetitorssite.com  to find info on your competitors backlinks.
4. Their PPC techniques- If you plan on launching a PPC campaign, you can learn a lot from your competition. Search for keywords, and see which competitors are bidding on the PPC terms. You can get a better overall analysis of your competition’s PPC strategies by letting an SEO company handle the work for you.
5. Their off site efforts- What else are your competitors doing besides their main website? Search for their names in Google, and see what comes up. If they have a strong Internet marketing plan, you’ll likely find them in social networks, article directories, press release websites, forums, and blogs. Take note of where your competitors are placing their marketing efforts. It will help you come up with a plan for surpassing them.

Common in the insurance business you will hear things like the 80/20 plan. What that means is some insurance plans will cover 80% of the bill while leaving you with the remaining 20% balance. With Internet marketing, I have coined my own 80/20 plan and indeed put it into practice.

My business is mainly in developing niche sites that are run using WordPress. I write content that targets very high paying keywords in Google AdWords. My content indeed is very well written, unique, useful, entertaining and informative. The goal in mind though is to monetize it using Google AdSense. Some content I write that targets certain keyword phrases need a little more boost than others. Most of my content targets longtail keywords. However, some do not and need additional love.

The 80/20 plan that I follow is very simple. I invest 20% of my time writing content and 80% of my time marketing it. Depending on the strength of competition of the keyword phrases I am targeting will dictate the level of depth I go into marketing each article or page I create. For me, Internet marketing is a primary method of promoting my content on the Internet. It combines two elements: search engine marketing and social network marketing.

Search engine marketing is really simple if you think about it. All that is required is a search engine optimized web site or blog and your ability to write content in a creative way that caters to both humans as well as search engines. In other words, in order for you to rank well for the keyword phrases you are targeting, you have to carefully write your material in a way that uses the keywords and related terms in your content a certain way and at a certain frequency. All in all though, it’s not difficult but it does take some time to master.

The tricky part is social network marketing. As mentioned above, there are times when I want to rank for more competitive keyword phrases. These terms fall outside from what I would consider being longtail. Long tail keyword marketing does not require backlinks, while targeting more primary keyword phrases do. That is where social network marketing kicks into gear.

Many people look at social network marketing in terms of scoring votes of your submitted content into these various networks. While voting does indeed play its role in the my big picture of social network marketing, it doesn’t take the role you may think it does. Many of these popular social networks NOFOLLOW their links. So even though the page that your submitted content appears on ranks well in the search engines, you dont’ get credit for the links.

What is the point towards getting your content submitted into social networks? Well, really the point and reason why I like my content listed in social netowrks is for the fact that if someone else likes what they read, they may in return write a post about it on their blog which will provide a direct search engine friendly backlink to my content and or home page.

Internet Marketing isn’t just limited to search engine marketing and social network marketing. You also have the element of email list marketing as well as instant messenger marketing. Email list marketing is great because you can send out direct email to your subscribers and inform them of the content you wrote. Depending on how close you are with your subscribers, you can possibly even ask your subscribers to link to your newly publsihed content. In doing so, you are establishing backlinks to your content.

The same is true for instant messenger marketing. If you have about 25 buddies in your instant messenger contacts and speak with them daily. You can easily ask them to check out your newly publsihed article or web page and ask if they wouldn’t mind providing you with a backlink to it.

No matter what you do, always remember the 80/20 Internet Marketing Plan. Once again, use 20% of your free time towards creating content and 80% of your free time marketing and promoting your content. If you do that, you’ll see super huge results.

What are some other ways that you can market and promote your content? If you have some ideas, feel free to share them below in the comments.

Today I want to talk to you about some reasons why your business needs a blog. You might not know what a blog is exactly and I will also cover that in this article as well. In order for your business to be successful you need to have it exposed to thousands of people. This as you know, is commonly called advertising. With advertising comes cost. As a business owner, I am sure that you have quickly discovered that it is in your best interest to find effective forms of advertising. All in all, you probably are open towards paying money for advertising; however, I am sure that you’d like to make sure that your money is well spent.

Let me introduce you to the world of blogging. Blogging is the single most cost effective form of advertising. You may be asking why and the reason is simple. Blogging cost virtually next to nothing and it has such a huge broadcast signal that can reach out to literally thousands of people in a single month. Real quick though, you may be wondering what a blog is, so let me explain that.

A blog is a type of web site that is used in a way that resembles an online journal, or a diary. Initially, this might sound silly to have something like this for your business, but trust me, it is not. A blog is a type of site that can easily attract targeted people to your business, products and services. Now, I am sure that you obviously have an interest in search engine marketing and I am also sure that you already have a business web site and have an interest in making it more search engine friendly. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading the SEOHosting.com blog.

With that said, a blog is much different than your business web site. The average business web site consists of only a few pages. These few pages indeed do get indexed in the search engine and people will find you because of that. However, why only score traffic from a handful of web pages that when you can score 100 times that amount of traffic when you have 100 or even 1000 pages indexed in the search engines? That is what a blog does. A blog allows you a way to quickly and effectively publish pages on the Internet that in return will be found by targeted people in the search engines.

You may be wondering how you can start a blog. This is actually very simple, or really let’s just say that it isn’t any more difficult than it was for you to launch your business web site. Also, when your blog is built for you, this is something that you can run completely on your own without having to pay a webmaster to run it for you. You can use your blog to simply write posts, or journal entries, that communicate things or events that are happening within your business.

Let’s assume that you are a computer sales and repair store. If you had a blog, you could announce on your blog that you are offering a 50% Off Desktop Clearance Sale. When you write a post, or journal entry about this and explain all the details and publish it on your blog, eventually this information can be found in the search engines on pages such as this one. When someone searches Google or other search engines, for 50% computer sales, or similar, your blog post has a very good chance of pulling up in the search results. If you get traffic from this search, that is very targeted traffic, most importantly, it is free traffic. You didn’t pay a dime for it. The only time invested was the time you spent writing the post on your business blog.

Here are some quick bullet points that outlines why you should have a business blog:

1. Very cost effective form of advertising
2. Very low maintenance and doesn’t require must skill to operate.
3. The reach of your messages are delivered to thousands of people for free.
4. You can easily funnel traffic direct to your business, products and services.
5. You can easily use your blog to self promote your own business web site towards getting it to rank better in the search engines.
6. You can easily convert traffic into signing up for a mailing list so that you can send out mailers.
7. You can become an expert in your niche and increase the level against your competition.
8. You can easily grow a very close bond and relationship with your customers.

There are many reasons why your business should start a blog and I am surprised to not see many more businesses doing it. Just earlier this year, finally Walmart launched their official blog called The Check Out Blog. This blog become an instant hit almost over night and I can’t begin to tell you how much their blog is helping their business.

I am sure that I will talk more about blogging, but seriously if you’d like to hear some more advice about how you can start a blog for your business, please do let me know by simply dropping a comment using the form below.

I have often speculated whether or not having your content submitted or bookmarked into social networks and bookmarking sites could improve your site SEO. I know for a fact that you can for sure increase traffic to the individual pages and sections of your site that have been submitted or bookmarked. However, in doing so, does it actually help your site become more search engine friendly?

It would be silly of me to claim that I am truly an SEO expert. I am honestly not. I have much more experience in search engine marketing rather than search engine optimization. For those who don’t know, indeed, there is a huge difference between the two. A search engine optimization expert is one who specializes totally in making a web site truly a search engine magnet. A search engine marketing expert, in my opinion, is an individual who specializes in writing content for the exclusive purpose of ranking well in the search engines for certain targeted keywords or phrases.

With that being said, I consider myself to be more on the lines of a search engine marketing expert over being a search engine optimization expert. While I am not totally discounting out that I indeed have SEO skills, I just know that for there are many other people who have a higher level of SEO skills than myself. Also another thing to consider is the fact that I feel that SEO is slightly over-rated. What I mean by that is I think people tend to over-complicate the simplicity of having a search engine friendly web site.

On the matter of discussing whether social networks and bookmarking sites can indeed enhance your web stie SEO, I’d say that they do. I don’t believe that they have a very large impact on your web site SEO, but I do believe that there is a slight improvement. With that said though, the improvements or enhancements if you will, are not what you might expect. The elements that I believe are enhanced stems a little deeper than the default answer most people would assume to be increased backlinks.

While it is true, submitting your site, sections and individual web pages will help increase the number of backlinks, it is also true that many of these claimed popular social networks and bookmarking sites use the NOFOLLOW tag on external links. For those who don’t know what the NOFOLLOW tag is, this is a tag added to a hyperlink that disallows a search engine (commonly Google) from passing through the link to the destination site. In other words, when an external link has the NOFOLLOW attribute assigned, credit for that backlink is not given. Most all social networks and bookmarking sites use the NOFOLLOW attribute.

So as I mentioned, backlinks really isn’t something I would bank on. But still, I do believe that SEO can be enhanced with submitting into the social networks. For me, in addition to having SEM qualities, I too consider myself to be an “Out of the box” thinker. I tend to look at cause and effect a lot. I tend to observe end user patterns and behaviors. More so, I consider what people do when they find things of interest within the social networks. While most people would assume that the traffic and SEO is received from the submission into these networks, I more believe that it is what the community does after they find the content within these networks.

I have a personal blog of my own. Many of you reading this already know this. One of the most common things I do on my blog is share information with my readers. At the moment, I have around 1200 subscribers who read my blog daily. When I find something interesting on the Internet, my gut reaction is to share this information with my readers. By sharing excellent and rich quality information with my readers that helps my blog continue to grow. So, when I find something cool in the social networkings or bookmarking sites, I typically end up writing a blog post about my findings and provide my readers with a direct link to the source of information I found.

So you see, while the process of having your content listed in social networks and bookmarking sites might not technically help your SEO, in many ways it does. If your content is listed or submitted, then there is a very good chance that people who find it will end up writing a post about it on their blog or web site. When a publisher or blogger does that, the results are huge for your SEO. Backlinks indeed are very powerful and backlinks are totally needed to compete with higher competitive words in Google as well as other search engines. The more backlinks you have to your web site, sections within your web site and individual web pages within your web site, the better your SEO is for sure.  So consider this, next time you discover that someone has submitted one of your web pages or blog posts into a social network.