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.

Alerting search engines that you’ve updated your website and would like to have their spiders re-crawl the domain can be accomplished by ‘pinging’ them with your URL. This feature is built-in to most popular blog and CMS platforms (like WordPress) and will automatically ping various networks anytime that you save or publish something new. Sometimes though it can be beneficial to ‘help’ this process along, especially if you’re creating a site from scratch and don’t have any sort of auto-ping functionality built-in.
Two websites that will ping a long list of services for you are Pingoat and Pingler. These are both great resources for any website developer.

I’m a big fan of Pingler in particular because it lets you modify the list of services that it will contact when you use it.

Now there are many blackhat, whitehat and well “greyhat” uses for pinging these services to let them know of a site update, all of which are hot-topics for debate (which I won’t get into just yet). Just a word of caution though – You can easily get de-indexed if you ping Google too often, as well as from a variety of other search engines…so with that said, you’ve been warned. Don’t abuse this service!

For those of you looking for a full list of URL’s that allow you to notify them of updates, i’ve provided such a list below. It also includes all the international URL’s for Google’s Blogsearch. Keep in mind a lot of these actually will ping multiple resources so if you use them all, you’ll be hitting a large number of duplicate services….just a heads up. Enjoy.

XML-RPC Ping Services

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.mw.net.tw/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blog.with2.net/ping.php

http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://blogoole.com/ping

http://blogoon.net/ping

http://blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://blogsdominicanos.com/ping

http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/pingRPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2

http://blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://blogsnow.com/ping

http://blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://catapings.com/ping.php

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://fgiasson.com/pings/ping.php

http://focuslook.com/ping

http://holycowdude.com/rpc/ping

http://imblogs.net/ping

http://j-ranking.com/ping.cgi

http://lasermemory.com/lsrpc

http://mod-pubsub.org/ping.php

http://newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.amagle.com

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.blogg.de

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogoon.net/

http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc

http://ping.fc2.com/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.gpost.info/xmlrpc

http://ping.kutsulog.net/

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.namaan.net/rpc

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.speenee.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se

http://ping.wordblog.de

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://pinger.onejavastreet.com

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://pingqueue.com/rpc

http://queerfilter.com/ping

http://r.hatena.ne.jp/rpc

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.britblog.com

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080

http://rpc.newsgator.com

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping

http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.wpkeys.com

http://rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php

http://rssfwd.com/xmlrpc/api

http://serenebach.net/rep.cgi

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://wasalive.com/ping

http://weblogalot.com/ping

http://weblogues.com/RPC

http://xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php

http://blogupdate.org/sverige/ping/

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://blogping.unidatum.com/RPC2/

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.blogg.de/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/RPC2/

http://pingoat.com/

http://pingqueue.com/rpc/

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://rpc.britblog.com/

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.wpkeys.com/

http://zing.zingfast.com

Tracking202, which is quiet possibly the single most important tool any affiliate marketer can have in their arsenal, just announced yesterday that they were starting to take applications for the new Tracking202 Pro Private Beta Program. While enrolled in this trial, all fees associated with the application will be waived with the exception of any API calls. Once the private beta is over the service will switch over to being a paid analytics program….the first that the company has ever offered.

Up until now all Prosper202 applications have been completely free of charge. These include:

• Tracking202 – A great link analytics program to help you map trends, ctr, and much more.
• Export202 – A utility to convert PPC campaigns from one advertising network to another (i.e Google->MSN).
• WorldProxy202 – A great service that offers free international proxies in Canada, USA, Australia and the UK. This was always great for checking how your ads would appear to the international search markets.
• Meetup202 – An event/user group planning system allowing you to create, manage, and track gatherings.

It should be interesting to see what new features this Pro version has, something to note though is that there will not be a self-hosted version this time. Tracking202 Pro will be only sold through their subscription service. I don’t know how well this will go over with the AM crowd as the biggest fear in using any subscription service is that someone will steal ideas, LP’s, strategies, etc.. All of which are visible through this tracking application.