Researching the Competition 

Getting Started: Researching Your Competition For Ideas

Understanding your competition and your niche is part of the development process. Your next step should be to take some time and browse through a few competitive web sites. Understanding your competition is an important first step before developing your own site. If you have already established an idea for a product, it is time to conduct some market research and search keywords that match your product idea(s). If someone is already providing the same service, or selling the product that you have just thought of, do not be discouraged. Your idea may be even better or may just have a different perspective.

Start by viewing the home page and each subsequent page of your competitor’s web site to see what they have or have not thought of, and identify what could differentiate your product from theirs. While you are at their page, view their page source for META tags. META Tags are within the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) within the source document and provide information to the search engines. The process to accomplish this is described below.

Why look at META Tags?

Although today METAtags are really unnecessary to get listed in the popular search engines META tags still provide useful information, such as page descriptions and keywords back to search engines through scanning programs called spiders and robots.

Most of the major search engines use sophisticated statistically based algorithms or programs to evaluate your site and then categorize it. They use search programs called spiders or robots which are automated programs that scan your source code and page content and look for keywords to categorize your web site for each respective search engine.   The use of META tags in your source code is important because is provides specific information that you want to be known about your site to them. Omitting META tags may not lower you chances of proper placement within the search engines but can provide important listing information such as page description and page title. The bottom line is it will increase the possibility of your site being categorized correctly. Generally, these tags are situated between the HEADER tags of your HTML in your source page.  Do not be intimidated by all of this “tech-talk,” this is not rocket science, just know-how.   

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