||||The Quiet Affiliate

The REAL ShamWow – one of the best over-dubs/remixes of shamwow and vince that you will ever see.Youll laugh so far you’ll rip your pants.. it’s great

courtesy of Jacks Films

80% of the time setting up any SEM campaign, especially if it’s selling products in an already crowded market (i.e. the majority of CPA offers in affiliate marketing), is spent on research. Some prefer to use free tools, some rely on paid services or applications that might offer additional marketing benefits and then there’s a whole separate group which will uses home-grown scripts that achieve a combination of tasks. First I’ll show you some of the freely available tools that you can use to research the competition, from finding out what other websites link to them (i.e. backlinks) to even what other websites the owner is hosting on the same IP address. This is part one of a series on SEO research tools: Researching The Competition (For free).

Free Competitive Research Tools:

WhoIsHostingThis.com – Find out what hosting company is being used for the website. For most this won’t matter much but for some of you, this information can be used in more grey-hat SERP strategies.

Quarkbase.com – A mash-up of some of the top research utilities that you’d check for any given site. From the # of links on social bookmarking sites, basic domain and webserver information, related sites, company information and even a comparison of several different ‘traffic ranking’ utilities. This is by far one of the most comprehensive and easy to use research utilities for any given website. A similar tool (that is open-source) is Xinu Returns.

SEOPro’ Link Checker – One of the best FREE services to check a website’s backlinks, including both the anchor text used as well as the homepage and link PR. Useful to see what links your competition are using to help build their SERP as well as which links have potential to improve (i.e. finding page links with high homepage PRs and working to improve the quality of the link).

What is hosted on that IP? – Great tool from SEOEgghead that will tell you what other domains are being hosted on the same ip or domain.

Redirect Check – Here’s another from SEOEgghead that will tell you all the paths taken to reach a specific domain, useful if they’re using multiple re-directs – this tool will identify every stop along the way.

Domain Tools – From the basic WHOIS information and META Tag information to previous owners and nameserver changes (though most of the more detailed information requires a paid subscription), this website has a bunch of tools that are useful in hunting down the owner of a website (or finding similar sites).

SocialMention.com – Search blogs, social networking sites (like twitter), comments, images, news and a variety of other sources for your keyword or website. You can even export the results in csv format. Great for finding out where people are talking about your competition or niche.

Quick Bulk PageRank and IP Lookup – This tool will let you look-up the pagerank and ip addresses of multiple URL’s, perfect for when you have a long list of sites and want to quickly see which would be the best to try and get a link from. It’s one of Esrun’s tools (a well-established figure in ‘blackhat seo’).

Multiple SERP Tool – An amazing script that gets the results on the first 3 keywords of a domain, then parses out the top 3 word combinations in the results pages and ultimately spits out a top-40 list of domains for that niche based on an intuitive ranking system. A must-use for niche research.

BuiltWith.com – Can’t figure out what platform a website is using to host their content? This site will let u know the basics from whether or not it’s using a popular CMS back-end like Wordpress down to what software the server might be running.

Next up will be free keyword tools.

Have a video game portal and you’re tired of folks iframing their own ads around your games? Want to break the google image iframe when it reaches your site? Easy, just copy and paste this code at the top of your file and it’ll break you out of any iframe. For large sites it’s best to put it in an external .js file and just use an include call at the top of each page:

<script type="text/javascript">
	<!--
		if (top.location!= self.location) {
			top.location = self.location.href
		}
	//-->
</script>

Enjoy