You can Google your competitors and take a close look at what they’re doing, but an easier, more effective method is pull this information in via Market Samurai. If you haven’t yet done so, I highly recommend you download your free trial version here.

Market Samurai offers several modules, each with a specific use to accomplish a specific goal. The one we use to evaluate your online competition is the SEO Competition module.

We plug your keyword phrase into this module and it returns the top 10 results for the phrase. But you can get that from Google, right? Not so fast. Remember the personalization we spoke of previously? This concept still applies to any search conducted from your browser.

Information returned by Market Samurai includes the domain age, page rank, incoming links, back links to the page, back links to the domain, how many links are from the coveted .gov or .edu domains, whether they’re listed in DMOZ or Yahoo’s paid directory, whether they’ve optimized the title, URL, description and header tags, and how long it’s been since the domain was indexed. All useful info, but that’s not all. You also get a PR analysis – how many of the links coming into the site are from high PR sites, and an anchor text analysis – what was the text used for the links to the site.

Now add the URL of your site to pull the same information from it – an easy, color coded comparison – and you can easily see where to start working on your site.

For that plumbing site example, we learned that the top competitor had high authority links inbound from the Better Business Bureau, Yellow Page advertising, and certain directories (both free and paid). A little bit of sleuth work helped immensely.

Broken links can pop up anywhere. Maybe you’ve shared a photo from Flickr on your post, then the photographer removed the picture. Maybe you’ve copied and pasted a link wrong … adding a second http://. And quite possibly you’ve received comments from sites that no longer exist. I’ve just scanned this website and found each of those instances and more. They’ve all been removed – and there were a lot of broken links. How embarrassing!

You also want to pay attention to how you’re leaving links to your site. The link to this site’s home page is http://expressmarketingmemo.com/. Notice the trailing slash. We all tend to omit it because the link will work with or without it. But that’s only because your page is being redirected behind the scenes (we hope*). Write the link right and no redirection is necessary. Make it easy for those spiders!

You have two options for finding broken links on your site:
* The W3C Link Checker and
* Xenu’s Link Sleuth

The W3C Link Checker is done online – no downloads necessary. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a free download. I found it to be more powerful and easier to use, especially since you can export the results to a TAB delimited format and import into Excel. That makings fixing the errors a bit easier.

You’ll want to fix everything that returns a status of ‘server error,’  ‘not found,’ ‘forbidden request,’ ‘no connection,’ and ‘no such host.’ Here’s how: Each entry in Xenu is accompanied by a title. Open up your ‘posts’ page in WordPress and search on that title. Remove or fix each broken link, and click update. That’s all there is to it.

*  If your site is not set up properly, your home page might show up as an actual page on each of these extensions:

• www.homepage.com AND homepage.com
• www.homepage.com/AND homepage.com/
• www.homepage.com/index.html AND homepage.com/index.html/

Believe it or not, Google sees each of those extensions as actual pages and you suffer the consequences of what they perceive as duplicate content on your site. If this is occurring on your site, I can help. Please get in touch with me via my contact form.

Related Off-Site Article:

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – More than Just a Broken Links Finder

My husband, Gerald, has built an impressive number of links to his Web site through forum posting. But for him it hasn’t been about building links at all. That’s just a happy byproduct. Gerald is the author of today’s post:

I spend several hours a week actively engaged on several of the scale modeling community’s forums. As an avid scale modeler, I enjoy the time interacting with others who enjoy and share my interest in this hobby. It has also been a lucrative tool to market my products directly to the consumers who use them.

My approach attracting new customers from this venue is very subtle. It has to be, as there are rules (terms and conditions of membership) I must obey. I approach this as scale modeler and member of the community first. Then as a representative of my business and its products second.

Those who join these communities only to self promote find themselves quickly being ignored, blocked and eventually outcast. These forums serve as a conduit of communication where the membership can exchange ideas, ask questions, share reference resources and most importantly to the savvy small business owner, provide referrals to towards your products and services that they are seeking.

Many of the forums which I subscribe have rules which ban out right advertising and product promotion. When the opportunity arises I will make recommendations and show examples of the results others as well as myself have experienced using the products I produce. Instead of it being a pointblank in your face advertisement, it is done in more of a whisper of sorts.

I try to be of service to others, providing hints, tips, techniques and guidance to my fellow scale modelers as they try to increase their individual skill sets or tackle a project which is outside their comfort zone. This earns one respect if your suggestions are sound and viable. That respect in turn leads to trust, which in turn can benefit you in your efforts to influence consumer’s product purchasing decisions…towards your products and services.

The end result is the more time I spend interacting with those in my targeted consumer demographic the greater return I get. These subtle hints, aimed at a specific group, have yielded more return than a broad spectrum ad promoting my products. How do I know it works? The tangible result is more orders for my products. This is a direct marketing strategy with zero cost except my time. I enjoy the time spent so it doesn’t really feel like W-O-R-K.

Today’s Assignment: Identify and locate a forum group that applies to the consumption of your products. Join the group. Watch and listen to the group, then step in and introduce yourself. Engage in conversations but do not promote yourself or your company until you feel comfortable that you are part of the community.

Microsoft’s Bing, which has branded itself as a “decision engine” has been nipping at Google’s heels for quite some time now. When you bring a PC home from the store, Internet Explorer is the default browser and Bing is the default search engine. If your market is less than tech-savvy, this is especially relevant. They’ll stay put, and use what’s already installed and accessible.

If you rely on foot traffic for business, don’t overlook the importance of being found in local listings web-enabled phones, as well as through local search via the conventional office computer. Local search is one area where Bing excels. Check out this listing for my home town of Neenah, WI. It’s convenient, uncluttered, and easy to use.

Clicking through to the restaurant category reveals more choices. I can select a restaurant by the strength of customer reviews, by price point, atmosphere, and more.

Whether or not you use Bing isn’t the question. Your business needs to be found in its Local Listing Center.

To sign up for a Bing local listing, visit https://sssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx. You’ll need a Windows Live ID to sign in. Be sure to fill out your business listing as completely as you can. Use keywords as appropriate and DO link back to your Web site. Choose up to six categories for your business, listing the most important one first. As with Google, your listing will need to be verified to prove that it’s your business. Once they get in touch with you and verify your business, you’re good to go. Get out there!

Are you listed on Bing?

Maybe you’re already using Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family. That’s a great place to start, but I encourage you to take it one step further and set up a business page. A Facebook business (or fan) page offers the same easy-to-use, easy-to-look-at functionality, but it’s all business.

Your business page can sport up-to-the-minute status updates that any “fan” will see on their own news wall. You business page is public and you’ll find that it’s quickly indexed by Google.

Think of your status message updates as tiny blog posts because not only will your Facebook fans see them, but they’ll show up in the search results on Google and Bing. Be sure to link back to your main company web site from within both your personal and business page profiles.

Today’s Assignment: If you’re not already on Facebook, sign up at www.facebook.com. Begin with setting up a profile. Take a few minutes to fill out your basic information. Add only the personal information that you’re comfortable sharing with everyone in the universe. Upload a photo. Update your status with anything you like, then search for a few friends. I’ve found friends on Facebook that I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. That’s the fun part!

Next, create a page for your business. That’s easiest to do if you start from another business page. You’ll find ours here: www.facebook.com/ZeroToSixtyMarketing. Go ahead and click the “Become a Fan” button at the top of the page if you’re so inclined, then scroll down the left side of the page to the link “create a page for my business.” From there, follow the on screen directions for the basic setup.

Want to learn more about marketing your business with Facebook? Check out these resources:

• Small Business Guide – Marketing Your Business with Facebook from New York Times
• Facebook Business Pages – How YOU Doin’?

One More Reason to Subscribe to Express Marketing Memo

Beginning next week, we’ll be offering a free gift to e-mail subscribers of Express Marketing Memo. I’m not ready to let the cat out of the bag yet, and will only say that it’s a small token of our appreciation to our loyal readers.  So, if you haven’t already subscribed by e-mail, I hope you’ll take a minute to add your first name and e-mail address to the form on the upper right of this page.

Today’s link building tips assignment: Sign up for Digg and set up your profile there. Add links pointing back to your web site or blog, and also to your Twitter profile. Then “Digg” a few articles (from others) that you find interesting and / or applicable to your message. This shows you’re interested in what others have to say … and not just there to promote yourself. You’ll notice that last sentence will be a theme throughout. It’s vital that you not skip it. Finally, if a page from your site is a good fit for Digg, go ahead and submit it. If not, don’t force it. Not all pages are “Digg-worthy.”

Either way, you’ve gained a link to your site through your profile and your profile will be associated with ALL of your Digg submissions. Those who think Digg is important will find you there. Those who don’t, will find you elsewhere.

Here’s where you’ll find me on Digg: http://digg.com/users/ShariV. Have you found Digg to be useful or interesting? Please include your Digg username in your comments.

Let’s start 2010 with a bang, and dive right into helping you and your business get found online. Today and every Thursday this year, you’ll find one or more quick link building tips. Apply them as you receive them and I guarantee that at this time next year you won’t still be wondering how to get people to your site.

Yes, you can reap faster results, but in keeping with our theme of 30-minute tips … and remembering that the slow and steady tortoise won the race, let’s commit to executing at least one of these tips each week.

With that steady progress in mind, I encourage you to subscribe via email so that you don’t miss any of our weekly link building tips.

How Many Times Will They Find You Online?

An advertising rule of thumb is that a customer needs to be exposed to your message 7 – 9 times before they will act. Our advertising methods have changed over time (with the Internet being the great equalizer, making entry affordable for any size business), but the premise of advertising frequency remains valid. Your online prospects research and visit numerous sites before making a buying decision.

So my question to you is, will your online prospect be exposed to your message once, multiple times or not at all in the search engine results? You’ll need more than your web site or blog to achieve multiple top-ten listings for your company name or keyword phrase in the search results. Thankfully, a number of popular sites allow you to create an account or a page online – each known to perform well in the search engines. Our goal is for you and links to your company web site to be found on each of them.

Social Media Profiles to the Rescue

Let’s begin with Twitter. Everybody’s heard of it and Google, Bing, and other search engines index your profile and your tweets. In fact, Google and Bing rate it highly. Even if you think it’s a complete waste of time, sign up, create a profile for yourself and link it back to your web site. Of course, I hope that you’ll do much more than that. You CAN contribute to the conversation (thereby creating links back to your site), make friends, and find new customers on Twitter. It doesn’t have to be a time-consuming monster. Set the timer for 15-minutes and engage. Repeat daily.

If you’d like more information, Susan Hamilton covers the most crucial Twitter details in her post, How to Twitter – 7 Easy Steps.

Today’s assignment:

If you’re not already on Twitter, sign up, create your profile and link back to your web site. If you have a Twitter account, but you’ve been inactive, sign back in and take another look at your profile. Does it need to be freshened up? Have you uploaded a photo? Does it include a link back to your web site? And if you’re active on Twitter and we’re not yet connected, give me a shout @ShariV. Just like I hope you do, I’m committing to engaging on Twitter for at least 15-minutes per day in 2010.

Image Credit: Eagle102.net on flickr

Why Squidoo? For several reasons …

1. Squidoo has a vibrant community of writers and readers, and it’s easy to get plugged in.
2. Squidoo is considered an authority site, quickly indexed by Google. This is why Squidoo is valuable for building inbound links.
3. Every lens has an RSS feed, and you’re going to take advantage of that by submitting the feed to RSS directories.
4. Your lens is easily built using modules – little, if any HTML knowledge is required to build a great lens.
5. You can earn money for yourself or the charity of your choice, simply by building and publishing your lens.

I built a lens about designing professional business cards over the weekend. I did this to help improve the ranking for a recent post on Zero To Sixty Marketing’s Inside Line.  As soon as my Squidoo lens was complete, I linked to it from Facebook, Twitter and Delicious. The next step was submitting the RSS feed for the site to Feedage.com and Feedagg.com, two major RSS feed directories. Finding the actual RSS feed to submit was a little tricky, and if anyone asks how in the comments, I’ll update this post with instructions to make it easy for you.

Since the process of building a Squidoo lens is fairly quick and painless, I’ll repeat it for other blog posts featuring keywords for which we want to rank. Each lens will provide valuable backlinks to our site, plus we’ll gain readership on Squidoo, and as a side benefit maybe we’ll make a little cash for our efforts. Not a bad deal at all.

Your assignment for this week: Dive right in and build your first Squidoo lens. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect; just get it started. We’ll go back and make it shine later. Are you ready to Squidoo?

With the introduction of Google Caffeine active Twitter users will soon be seen on Google search pages. This is a promising new development that I believe will help small business owners get the absolute most out of search.

Caffeine promises, among other things, faster indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Still in the development stages, it is not intended to change the appearance of your current Google search page other than indexing pages using a different algorithm will produce slightly different search results. That might be a totally kool thing. Adding Twitter pages will be an interesting nuance to Google’s product, and suggests to me the necessity of attention paid to this new and relevant audience.

As Caffeine continues to update, more user testing will be necessary due to the magnitude of the impending search capabilities. You can play in the sandbox yourself, here: Google sandbox and let them, and us, know what you think of the new offerings. Be sure to leave your URL in the comments below!

Photo Credit: Pink Sherbet Photography on Flickr

Related Articles: Channel Web:Google Caffeine Aims To Emulate Twitter Real Time Search, Mashable:Google Caffeine A Detailed Test Of The New Google

Soccer Practice by woodleywonderworks on flickr (cc)

SEO is part of a sound marketing strategy, but not an end in itself. We shortchange ourselves if we fail to look beyond search engine rankings.

More Web site traffic, top-10 search engine rankings, or more sales / leads … which of these is your goal? You may think that top-10 ranking will bring you more traffic, which is bound to bring in more sales or leads, but that’s not necessarily always the case. So choose one … which will do you the most good?

My vote is for more sales and qualified leads. Let’s step back from the worldwide web for a moment and ask those three basic questions that should form the basis for all of our marketing decisions:

1. Who is your customer?
2. Where will you find him?
3. What’s the most effective way to reach him?

Define Your Target Market

If your market is 30-45 year old, primarily male engineers, you’re obviously going to need to market to them differently than if your market is 16-21 year old students. Web traffic from the latter group may gain you some visibility among their peers, possibly a few backlinks if they find you interesting, but will it create any sales? Probably not.

Match Your Message to Your Market

More than that, if you mistakenly think that this 16-21 year old student traffic is a source of sales because you don’t understand your market … if your copy is written toward them instead of the engineers … not only will you have not made sales to the student, but your copy will likely have turned away your real market.

Ok, it’s an extreme example. I doubt many business owners would confuse those two very different markets. (Then again, even a brand as large as Motrin proved they didn’t understand one of their market segments late last year with a failed ad campaign aimed at babywearing moms. In case you missed it: Motrin Messes With Mommy Bloggers and Loses)

But I digress.
SEO performed before you understand your market is an exercise in futility. What good are top rankings for phrases that don’t convert to customers? Are there other channels you should be considering in addition to SEO and Internet Marketing?

Related Posts about SEO:

What is the Big Deal About Keyword Research?

Choosing the Right Keywords for Your Demographic

Links About Search Engine Optimization

Related Articles (Offsite):

Ruud Questions: Barry Welford on the difference between Internet Marketing and SEO / SEM

Internet Marketers are from Mars. Traditional Marketers are from Venus.