Here is a recent email we got…

"Your website says that I shouldn't bother too much about the search result counts and that I should instead check the the quality of the competing sites. How do I know if the competing sites are good? How can one measure it?"

This was in response to an article about a popular keyword myth posted at one of our sites.

Yes, it may not be possible to accurately measure the quality of a site, but you can surely get a good idea by just checking a few things.

Here are 5 things you should look for…

1. The age of the site.

You can do this by checking the domain whois and finding the date the domain was registered. This will not be accurate all the time because the domain may have been registered a long time ago and parked. Another method is to look it up in the way-back machine. This will not only give you an idea about when the site was launched, it will also show you how the site looked when it was first launched. You can also see how the site progressed over the years.

2. Web Page Ratings

Check the Alexa, Compete, Quantcast ranks and ratings for the site. These provide approximate information about the possible traffic to the site. You can even compare multiple sites. Quantcast also predicts the demographics of the site visitors.

3. Search Engine Visibility

Check the number of incoming links to these sites. You can check this on Google, Yahoo, Live, etc. Also check the number of pages on the site that are indexed by Google. You can also check the Google PageRank of the web page. Use the free Good Keywords v2.1 or SEOLab Professional for this.

4. Web Page Content

Visit the website and check the content. Do they have third party advertisements / Google Adsense on their sites? Are the sites selling their own products? Are their headings appropriate? Do they have a good web page structure?

5. Advertising Efforts

Are they doing PPC advertisements? You can use the Google Ad Preview Tool to check this. Type in the keywords you think they might be advertising for, select the region and language. See if you can find their advertisements in the preview tool results.

Try SEO Lab Professional

You may also want to check SEO Lab Professional. You can type in a keyword phrase and quickly find all the top competing sites, competing web page  titles and more. You can also easily check the search engine visibility of any competing site with a single click. You can even create branded SEO reports (in pdf) that contain information about related semantic keywords, competition, etc.

Google has released a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, a 22 page PDF document describing the basics of  "good" SEO. The document covers areas like improving the title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation and so on.

This is a good read for businesses that want to follow long term search engine optimization strategies. There are a number of do's and don'ts mentioned throughout the guide. There are also many examples created around a fictitious website called "Brandon's Baseball Cards".

Click Here To Download Google's SEO Starter Guide

The guidelines discussed in the Google SEO Guide are the same ones explained in the SEO Lab User Guide. Try SEO Lab Professional today and you will find it to be an ideal resource for implementing white-hat SEO techniques in a practical and search engine friendly way.

Here are six official search Engine Optimization related resources you will always want to make use of…

1. Google Webmaster Central

This is the one-stop place where you can read the official Google guidelines and get tips for improving and enhancing the traffic to your sites. You should also create a Google account if you haven't already done so. This will allow you to sign in to the Google Webmaster Tools to obtain reports about your sites and how Google sees your web pages.

2. Yahoo Webmaster Resources

This is a useful list of Yahoo resources and guidelines for site owners and webmasters. The provided information include Yahoo search content guidelines and FAQs.

3. Microsoft adCenter Lab Tools

A collection of useful tools for search volume seasonality forecast, demographics predication, keyword research etc. Some interesting tools include a cross-language keyword selection tool (currently seems to support only French) and an Ad-Text Writer.

4. Google Trends

Google Trends displays the search trends for various keywords from 2004 to now. This is a powerful brainstorming and idea generation tool. Spend some time with it every week and check out the trends for your business keywords.

5. Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer is the best public tool out there for checking the incoming links to your websites (and to your competing websites). Google provides this information within the webmaster tools after you sign in and verify your sites, but this information is available only for your own sites.

6. The Official Google Blog

This is the place to learn about the happenings at the most popular search engine. Keep an eye on this or subscribe to the RSS feed.