Someone is Spying on You!

When’s the last time to looked at your competitor’s website? Have you checked to see what kind of online advertising they’re doing? Do you know how much traffic they get to their site, or how many other sites link to them? Any idea how well optimized their site is, or how well they are positioned to get new customers?

Well, they may very well be looking at you – and you should do the same. The Internet has given us a great ability to track what’s happening on our own website(s), but it’s also given us the unique ability to lift the hood a little bit to see what’s happening with your competitor’s website.

GTS invested quite a bit of money into tools to see deeper, but any of you can see some cools stuff…at least trends and averages, with little to no cost.

• A good place to start is with Google Alerts (http://google.com/webalerts). This allows you to enter a name or keyword; yours or a competitor, and if a listing ever shows up in Google using those words, they’ll send you an email letting you know. Being notified of your own name or company name is a great way to start into Reputation Management. Something I’ll discuss in a future post.
  
• www.Compete.com is a great place to get details on your competitor websites, and compare several sites to see where each stands in the online market.
  
• www.myriadsearch.com is simple tool that brings the top listings of each major search engine into one portal. It allows you to search on a key term and see who shows up on each engine. You can do this on your own – the tool just makes it a little easier.
  

There are a bunch of other tools out there. If you know of one, feel free to post it in a comment. If you’d like to know more about some cool technical tools (if you understand HTML and SEO), leave me a comment and I’ll share.

Google's New Browser to Launch Today!

Yikes – my travel schedule has gotten bit crazy this month, hence the lack in posts. Well, to get back in the saddle, let’s start with some exciting breaking news about Google…

What browser do you currently use? Internet Explorer (IE)? Mozilla Firefox? Maybe some smaller browser like Netscape or Safari?

Well get ready. Any minute (literally) Google will be launching and announcing Google Chrome – Beta. Google’s new open source browser is likely to steal a large share of Microsoft’s browser market – already slashed by higher than expected adoption of Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Google has been hinting about Chrome lately, and some screenshots and broken videos on a temporary Google Chrome page have been caught by savvy Google stockers (the web’s version of paparazzi). But Google is expected to officially announce the launch of Chrome at 11am PST today, from their California Headquarters.

Expect a little more out of Google’s Chrome browser. Staci Kramer of PaidContent.org called it the Swiss-Army knife of browsers, with additional sets of roles and features, like enhanced JavaScript and tabbed browsing.

Poor Microsoft – what will they do now? Honestly, I like Microsoft – or maybe I’m just used to their products; but either way it will be interesting to see how this new browser heats up the Microsoft-Google war on Internet technology.