Analyzing Competitors

After selecting the best Virginia website design concept itâ€™s time to professionally research your competitors and partners. The goal is to grow your keyword list ever bigger, ever more profitable. This will yield the raw material for new keyword-focused content pages. Add two new columns to your table of keywords... IDEAS FOR CONTENT and POSSIBLE PARTNERS.

Use one of Top search engines or directories (Google, Yahoo, etc.) to search for each of the highly profitable keywords from the table. You can also use very interesting Meta search engine Ixquick. On Ixquick, a Web site gets one star for every major Search Engine that scores it in their Top 10. So it's a fast way to check all the major search engines at the same time. Web sites with three stars or more really know what they're doing and are not there by accident. If you are especially interested in finding merchants with affiliate programs, use pay-per-click search engine Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing). Top Web sites found there are serious and already pay for keywords, so it's more likely that they have an affiliate program than usual.

Review at least the first 10-20 Web sites from the top search results. As you get into this in-depth research, you'll notice three types of sites... for whatever reason they just don't fit. If your search on a keyword returns many Web sites that seem inappropriate, it's likely that this keyword won't bring targeted traffic to your Web site. You want targeted traffic unless you are paid per impressions of ad banners. Enter in POSSIBLE PARTNERS what kind of merchandise they sell. If they have an affiliate program that fits your concept, enter the URL of the join page for the affiliate program of that merchant. These Web sites are your direct competitors. They make money through banner ads and affiliate programs.