You are ready to begin optimising your website, you think you have all the keywords down pat, the content is written and you are ready to start taking on your opposition. But are you?

Even if we are talking niche markets, there is pretty much no chance your product or service is going to be the only one competing for top rank in the Google God and other search engine directories.

With PPC advertising constantly on the rise, with established players putting higher bids in place to make it even harder for the new business to get a start. Search optimisation is looking like an even greater asset for ROI when looking at long term results.

Competitor intelligence needs to be done whenever we are looking into marketing, and now it is a definite need before embarking on a search optimisation plan. If you do not perform competitor intelligence you are about to flush allot of hard earned coin straight down the toilet.

Follow this guideline before starting search optimisation

1. In-bound links
Inbound links the simple vote for a site by means of other sites linking to it. How many links are pointed at the top 5 sites in your market who are targeting the same keyword phrases as you are. If you are looking at sites with thousands of incoming links your job is getting close to brick wall territory. If those same sites have inbound links from .gov and .edu sites your job just got that bit harder again. If you are determined to take on this type of competition, a long standing SEO campaign is going to be needed, and we are talking at least two to three years hard yakka, with exceptional link building strategies in place.

2. What’s their PageRank?
Page rank is not to be lived by or even to be taken into consideration much as it is fickle and in many cases does not show a true indication of a websites worth. None the less, it does give a little insight into the quality of the inbound links to the given site. A website with a pagerank of 6, 7 or even higher can already be a tough cookie to crack.

3. Have they optimised, or are they just lucky
Do your competitors know what they are doing, or are they just lucky buggers who have haphazardly found themselves at the top of the heap. Believe it or not many a top ranking site has found its self there, simply because they have been around a while and have good content.

4. Domain age
Domain age, this is quite important, think of domain age as a length of time in business. Google puts far more weight on older domains then a brand new one straight out of the box.

5. Sub pages
Just because you have found sub pages in a site that are ranking well but don’t seem to have any page rank or inbound links to speak of, there is no place to be complacent. What is the root page or top level domain rank? Does the site actually have hundreds or thousands of links running to it, and it is a case of the site handing authority down the line?

Ways to find out questions from above

PageRank - How do you find out page rank? The easiest way is to have Google’s tool bar installed, it is by no means perfect in its representation of pagerank but is close enough and good enough for our purposes. You can down load the Google toolbar by following the linked text.

For determining pages indexed by Google and others, links inbound from sites and a host of other useful tools give SEO Quake a go, a plugin for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox it is a very good tool in the SEO competitor intelligence kit, again follow the linked text to download.

Another means of determining links inbound to the site you are looking at is to use either Yahoo or Google search and in the search box type ‘link:http://www.CompetitorsDomain.com.au’ this will present you with a list of inbound links to the domain. Please be aware results may vary between the two search engines, and depends on linked sites being indexed by the search engine directories.