Spying on Your Competitors: SEO SpyGlass

Written by ianternet on October 2, 2007

Spying or trying to imitate your competitors is a hard thing to do, especially if you are going to compete against known names and brands. But trying to imitate or follow their exact steps can help your provide you with some leverage. For example many bloggers followed John Chow’s previous layout. John Chow is a competitor to all bloggers, especially in the money making niche or internet marketing.

Trying to understand ranking is difficult and can be difficult if you do not have an understanding. What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Source: Wiki

Introducing SEO Elite:

SEO Elite is a tool that addresses the issues of search engine optimization, and was recently featured on our favorite affiliate marketing deals site, DealDotCom. Today, a lot of information online is located via companies like Google and Yahoo - 2 of the most powerful search engines around. By ranking highly on the search engines, your page gets more exposure and so more clickthroughs. If your site has traffic, you make income - it is a simple equation.

There are many SEO tools out there, but often they cannot even keep up with the ever changing search engines. SEO elite alone went through multiple changes, just to keep up with Google! Tools like SEO Elite attempt to give you the edge for your websites, by giving you a glimpse into what is ranking well in your particular niche. It is therefore mainly an analysis tool, and it is obvious that a lot of attention has gone into the features put into it.

Any free alternatives available?

We found that SEO SpyGlass (freely available) also does a good job of ranking analysing:

count the total number of backlinks that point to your competitor
advanced analysis of each backlink, from link text info to PR and Alexa stats

You can get a free license for SEO SpyGlass and use it for as long as you see fit absolutely free of charge. You can also upgrade to the professional version as well if needed. SEO SpyGlass will let you see what SEO is about and how it can affect your website.

This is a solid free alternative to SEO Elite and other big programs out there. Even if the free version is not as packed with features, it has the analysis tools you need. In fact, Aaron Wall had this to say about SEO Elite on his blog, albeit the article is now several months old:

I used to recommend Brad Callen’s SEO Elite, but due to evolving search algorithms placing more emphasis on site age and usage data I believe that looking through a link profile does not have much value beyond just getting a quick glance at it. And you can do that free.

He also helpfully cites a couple of other tools that could be used for link profile analysis, including:

In truth, it could be argued that all such SEO programs are not that useful in the long term, but they (including SEO Elite, it should be added) do have their uses. The question in your mind should be whether you can justify spending the extra cash on something like SEO Elite (price $167) when there are so many other free tools available.