No matter who you are there is always somebody out there who is better or who gets information before you. Trying to keep up can sometimes be difficult without the proper tools. The best way to keep up is by tracking what websites they are visiting and interacting on. Let me introduce a service that allows you to do just that, Backtype.com.

What does Backtype do?

Backtype is a comments search engine with a bit more functionality. Basically you can enter any url and it will list all websites where it has commented on, so you can build up a profile of what websites of where they are interacting and commenting on. Not only that but you can follow certain websites and be alerted when they have created a new comment on any site. To give you an example below is a screenshot for Richard Hearnes excellent SEO site RedCardinal.ie:

Along the right hand side you can see all the websites they have commented on. As you’d expect foran seo consultant there are a lot of seo related websites.

What else can you do with Backtype.com?

They have a feature called “Connect” and this feature is great if your a blogger. Have you ever wanted to know what articles or topics get the most reactions? Sure you can use the search function of technorati but what about the reactions on all the new social media sites like twitter etc? To show you an example I’ve put in Shoemoney’s site to see what articles of his have generated the most comments.

As you can see his article about making money from Twitter generate huge reactions which gives me suggestions for my next post.

Popularity: 31% [?]

When your link building for your site it is always better to get relevant links. Now there are many ways of finding relevant links, search engines, direcories, forums but one of the best ways is to see whoose linking to competitor websites or high profile websites in your niche.

There are two ways available to analyse competitors back links, one is the “link:” operator in Google, the other is Yahoo SiteExplorer. Now Google’s link operator will only show a handfull of a sites backlinks but SiteExplorer will show all backlinks but will only let you export 1000 of them.

Another problem we have with backlink analysis is the “no follow” tag. Not all links are valued equal and Google came up with PageRank to aid in solving this problem. PageRank is a value of authority assigned to a single webpage. An outbound link from a page will carry some of that PageRank. To allow webmasters control over their outbound links as webmasters do not always want to dilute their PageRank, Google introduced the “No Follow” tag. The “No Follow” tag informs Google not to pass any PageRank to the link, thus making the link have no benefit towards search engine rankings.

Not all Search Engines adopted the “No Follow” tag and Yahoo is one of them, so the problem with SiteExplorer is that it includes “No Follow” links and “Do Follow” links in its results. Well I’ve found a solution.

I’ve just begun using a firefox plugin called SEO Link Analysis by Yoast de Valk. SEO Link analysis adds to Siteexplorer the PageRank of the page that the links originate from, the Anchor Text used in the link, and offers colourcodes to explain if the link is a DoFollow link or No Follow link.

Below is a screenshot of SiteExplorer, before and after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer before SEO Link Analysis

SiteExplorer after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer with SEO Link Analysis installed

I hope this helps you with your competitor analysis!

Popularity: 26% [?]

O.k. one problem with affiliate marketing is keeping up with your competitors. You can monitor google adwords to see what affiliates are showing up but how do you know what other landing pages they have? Well I’m going to tell you! The answer is http://www.myipneighbors.com/

So how do you use myipneighbors.com for Competitor Analysis?

Well for an example I’m going to use Collin de Ruyck who was on the Top Affiliate Challenge. Collin was great on the show and I have a lot of respect for what he has achieved. His website is www.feedflare.ca.

So when we put feedflare.ca into myipneighbors.com it will list all other sites sitting on that server: Read the full story

Popularity: 7% [?]