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Know your competition: how to transfer business skills to the Internet market
One of the first things you should do before starting any business is to investigate the competition. Any business owner knows that this is crucial; determine how to position a business in the market, who to address, at what prices to establish and who to monitor. The same is true of the internet market.
However, this understanding is rarely transferred when a company decides to "connect." Perhaps the initial configuration is so daunting that you don't think of anything beyond the design and content of a website. The Internet, however, remains a market and is growing exponentially. Those same business skills should also be used here.
If you want to learn from the success of your competitors, you must first think like a search engine. By imitating popular keywords and phrases, you can benefit from traffic that would otherwise be directed to your competitors' sites.
The keywords are contained in what is called "Meta tags." These are tags found in the source code at the top of a web page and include descriptions, titles and keywords. You can access this information by viewing the source of any website, simply select "View" and "Source" in the toolbar.
If after looking at this code you fear that it resembles a strange language, do not despair! There are many programs available that will search the competitors' sites for this information and provide a complete report: in simple English. Just look for anything about search engine optimization (SEO), it is one of the hot new topics; and the products will overwhelm you. The danger is believing too much in the hype, not paying for the promises; Search engines are not as easy to fool as we are!
Another key ingredient is the links. Your page will be favorably ranked if search engines consider it an authority on a given topic. The links work a bit like votes, if someone links to your site you are effectively "casting a vote" of approval. However, the weight of this vote is affected by the amount of other sites to which they link, so be careful with "link farms" (pages that contain entirely links) because they will not help improve the positioning of your site . The easiest way to get links is through online directories, although people may not visit your site directly through these links, it will help with the overall search engine positioning.
Returning to the competition; You can find out who links to other sites using an online link popularity checker. In this way, you can try to have these sites also link with you. Remember, targeted traffic is the best, so look for links from sites that contain content similar to yours. If you are a business that sells stamps, your best links would be from stamp recognition pages, which is obvious.
Internet has been established for a while now. It is no longer an unknown jungle. As a new business that enters this field, you can learn from other people's successes and their mistakes!
