American Express has funding and Card solutions to help bring your best ideas to life and steady smiles to your customers’ faces.

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Follow your passion and we'll follow your lead, with Cards and funding to help you grow your business and your rewards. Terms Apply.

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Like many things in business, and perhaps in life, one of the best ways to get better at something is to analyze what others are doing -- particularly those doing better than you.

This idea rings true when it comes to search engine optimization and winning in the game of search. Often times, the best research you can do is understanding and analyzing the underlying elements that allow some sites to rank higher than yours for important keywords.

There are many reasons a site can rank well, but the following are the major components:

Keyword optimization -- sites that research and optimize their pages to rank well for specific search terms often improve rankings for these specific phrases.

Content creation -- this is my chance to promote the need for a blog and consistent creation of content.

Authority -- For the most part, authority has much to do with the quantity and quality of links that point to a site.

By employing a combination of the tools listed below you can better understand how your site ranks for the factors above: how sites that rank above you or compete directly with you fare, and what you can do to fix issues, optimize more thoroughly, choose better keywords, and target the right links back to your site.

Each of these tools have premium or paid services, but the free tools are powerful enough for any business to get ahead in the search game:

1. Compete

The name says it all. This tool allows you to become a better online marketer by monitoring your competition. Compete also provides you with great search analytics, referral analytics and ranked lists. The company maintains a blog that focuses on interesting sites can be found on the Internet. I often turn here to get a quick snapshot of traffic as the numbers are considered the most accurate.

2. Seomoz

Seomoz provides a toolbar that allows you to observe page metrics instantly when you open a Web page. In the Firefox version of mozBar, you can find, link and domain metrics for each page visited, page status codes and redirect paths, and page load times. This toolbar basically provides you with quick access to very useful and powerful tools while surfing the web.

Want more tips on building a better website? Check these out:

3. Website Grader

This tool allows you to enter your own website along with competing websites and receive a grade on how well your website is doing. The report includes the amount of traffic, any SEO problems, and how popular it is in social media. This report has its flaws, but I really like how it presents the view of your site from the marketing point of view rather than strictly SEO one.

4. Wordtracker

The free version of Wordtracker uses a keywords tool to help you find out what your customers are searching for and what your competitors aren’t yet targeting. Wordtracker also offers a tool that helps you acquire inbound quality links to your site. Thirdly, Wordtracker’s new tool finds your sites best keywords and shows you how to use them to benefit you in whatever you’re trying to accomplish.

5. KeywordSpy

KeywordSpy allows you to spy on your competitors and use the valuable information to get ahead. Some of the benefits from using the tool include discovering your competitors keywords, receiving daily database updates, see site’s spending for Adwords, find profitable keyword + ad copy combination, and access to over 127 million keywords.

6. Alexa

Alexa is useful to discover how popular a site is, find new sites, learn who owns a site and more. The information provided includes traffic stats, search analytics, audience, contact information, reviews, related links and clickstream. It also includes a number for Alexa traffic rank, traffic in US and sites linking in. The metrics are often very inaccurate, but paired with other data this can help easily put some pieces together.

7. SEO Book

SEO Book is a resource that compiles a wide collection of free and paid SEO tools sorted by categories such as Firefox Extensions, Web-based SEO Tools, Premium Firefox Extensions, Premium Web-based SEO Tools, and Listings of additional SEO tools by category. The RankChecker extension is a great tool for measuring how you rank for your keywords in the top search engines vs. your competitors.

8. Xinu Returns

Xinu Returns is a tool where the main focus is on Page rank, Backlinks, SEO rank and Rank checker. By simply entering the URL of your site of interest, Xinu Returns will provide you with a very simple chart of the valuable information you are looking for. A major benefit for this SEO tool is the simplicity of finding ranks, bookmarks, backlinks, etc. in a very effective way.

9. Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a linking tool from SEOmoz that provides you with your page authority, domain authority, root domains with links to your URL, and total links. Find detailed information of every site that links back to your own. With Open Site Explorer you are able to get up to 1,000 links and unlimited use for free.

10. SpyFu

SpyFu allows you to enter domains to battle is boxes versus each other. For instance, if you work for an email marketing company and are interested in comparing your keyword overlap to your direct competition, SpyFu provides you with useful tools to do just that. Also, if you are not interested in battling, there is an option to simply search a domain and find information such as best paid keywords, daily Adwords budget, organic keywords, top Ad competitors and more.

Have fun!

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.

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American Express has funding and Card solutions to help bring your best ideas to life and steady smiles to your customers’ faces.

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Follow your passion and we'll follow your lead, with Cards and funding to help you grow your business and your rewards. Terms Apply.

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Like many things in business, and perhaps in life, one of the best ways to get better at something is to analyze what others are doing -- particularly those doing better than you.

There are many reasons a site can rank well, but the following are the major components:

Keyword optimization -- sites that research and optimize their pages to rank well for specific search terms often improve rankings for these specific phrases.

Content creation -- this is my chance to promote the need for a blog and consistent creation of content.

Authority -- For the most part, authority has much to do with the quantity and quality of links that point to a site.

Each of these tools have premium or paid services, but the free tools are powerful enough for any business to get ahead in the search game:

1. Compete

2. Seomoz

Want more tips on building a better website? Check these out:

3. Website Grader

6. Alexa

9. Open Site Explorer

10. SpyFu

Have fun!

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.

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American Express has funding and Card solutions to help bring your best ideas to life and steady smiles to your customers’ faces.

Follow your passion and we'll follow your lead, with Cards and funding to help you grow your business and your rewards. Terms Apply.

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Like many things in business, and perhaps in life, one of the best ways to get better at something is to analyze what others are doing -- particularly those doing better than you.

There are many reasons a site can rank well, but the following are the major components:

Keyword optimization -- sites that research and optimize their pages to rank well for specific search terms often improve rankings for these specific phrases.

Content creation -- this is my chance to promote the need for a blog and consistent creation of content.

Authority -- For the most part, authority has much to do with the quantity and quality of links that point to a site.

Each of these tools have premium or paid services, but the free tools are powerful enough for any business to get ahead in the search game:

1. Compete

2. Seomoz

Want more tips on building a better website? Check these out:

3. Website Grader

6. Alexa

9. Open Site Explorer

10. SpyFu

Have fun!

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.

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American Express has funding and Card solutions to help bring your best ideas to life and steady smiles to your customers’ faces.

Follow your passion and we'll follow your lead, with Cards and funding to help you grow your business and your rewards. Terms Apply.

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Like many things in business, and perhaps in life, one of the best ways to get better at something is to analyze what others are doing -- particularly those doing better than you.

There are many reasons a site can rank well, but the following are the major components:

Keyword optimization -- sites that research and optimize their pages to rank well for specific search terms often improve rankings for these specific phrases.

Content creation -- this is my chance to promote the need for a blog and consistent creation of content.

Authority -- For the most part, authority has much to do with the quantity and quality of links that point to a site.

Each of these tools have premium or paid services, but the free tools are powerful enough for any business to get ahead in the search game:

1. Compete

2. Seomoz

Want more tips on building a better website? Check these out:

3. Website Grader

6. Alexa

9. Open Site Explorer

10. SpyFu

Have fun!

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine.