Now that everyone and their mother has a website and thinks they know SEO, odds are the number of websites competing for your keywords has increased drastically. Within any business, it’s vital to keep track of what your competitors are doing. This practice is even more important when it comes to SEO. In this post, I’ll share some steps to keep tabs on what your competitors are doing so you’ll remain on top.

1. Identify Your Competitors:  Obviously, the easiest way to find your competitors would just be to Google your keywords. Another good way would be Alexa Traffic tool and look at the related sites.
2. Setup Google Keyword Alerts: A great way to monitor your competitors as well as your industry in general is to setup Google Alerts for each of your primary keywords. Every time Google finds a blog post, press release, or article featuring your keywords, you’ll get an email with a link to it. Many times, Google alerts have alerted me to the fact that a competitor was using a less than ethical SEO tactic, such as splogging.  
3. Setup Google Company Name Alerts: In addition, setup a Google alert for each of your competitor’s names.
4. Check Your Competitor’s Back links: By using the “link:www.yourcompetitorurl.com” command in Google or Yahoo, you can see where your competitor’s back links are coming from. This is a good way of generating ideas for link building.
5. Check Your Competitor’s On-Site Tactics: What keywords are your competitors targeting on their landing pages? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discovered keywords on a competing website that I’d never considered.

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