The Internet makes this easy and accessible. In another business, for instance, you would have to take real effort to find out what competition is doing. One of jobs of marketing department of a property management firm, for instance, is to call around and go visit other apartment complexes to see what they offer, for how much, what specials they’re having, how their staff behaves, and what amenities are. If suddenly everyone is offering ceiling fans and you’re not, this is not good.

If you’re an Internet business, it’s fairly easy to check out another business’ website to see what’s going on. Google your product or field and find names of others doing same thing you do. If they rank high enough to place on first couple of pages of a search engine, they’re worth taking a look at.

Visit at least 10 websites. Here are some of things to look for:

A top listing in search engines, especially in Google, can increase visitors to your web site and help. Let's say you sell web design services. If your site was at top of list when people searched for "web design" in Google, it could increase number of people who know you exist and know what you do, by a factor of ten or more.

You may already know that a top listing in Google will help your business, but at present you are having a tough time even finding your site in Google search engine listings. What can you do to help Google find your listing and put it as close as possible to top of list?

Submitting Your Site Google uses a "spider" to look for links from one site to another and to add information about additional sites and web pages to its database. Google's "spider" is very active and may already have found your site. If any other site has a link to your site and is listed by Google, Google may have found your site on its own. To find out if your web site is listed, just type in www.yoururl.com into query box at www.google.com and press search.

If your site isn't listed, you can prompt Google to spider to it at http://www.google.com/addurl.html Submit your primary url and Google will find rest of your site.

Getting your site listed by Google and other search engines is first step. Next you need to make it easy for search engines to code your site pages correctly and move them towards top of their listings. Here's how:

Picking Right Keywords If you want your prospects to find your site use words and phrases most commonly associated with your product or service in your web pages. These are called keywords. In selecting your keywords, think about problem your prospects want to solve. If you sell ergonomic chairs, which will work best, "comfy chairs" or "eliminate back pain" or "ergonomic chairs"?