Keeping track of your competition can be done in many different ways and for many different reasons. Knowing what they are doing and how they are doing it can help your own business website immensely and go a long way in keeping ahead of the competition. To help you achieve this, there are a plethora of tools available to assist you in monitoring the competition.

Monitoring Traffic

Seeing the amount of traffic going to one of your competitors is a good indicator of what they are doing right with regards to attracting visitors. A website with a lot of traffic maybe incredibly SEO friendly, have great content or even be offering something you are not. Although the tools available are not 100% accurate they can still provide some very good information.

Compete.com

Definitely one of the more accurate of the traffic estimators that are around; this has plenty of free tools that will help you compare sites and their traffic. There are some premium tools available which you have to pay for, but for larger websites in the US this is a great and relatively accurate tool to use.

Alexa.com

This is a great website with plenty of top tools that anyone deciding to make a website, even the smallest web page can make great use of. Alexa.com has tools that will show how much traffic there is and where it is coming from with regards to partners and affiliates. You can compare up to 5 websites including your own at once and although not 100% accurate, this is a very good traffic indicator for any website to use.

Trends.google.com

Probably one of the most accurate of Traffic analysis tools, this is more suited to the established larger websites as opposed to the smaller, more recent ones. This has two main tools; one to monitor the searches and the other to monitor the traffic movement. This was only launched less than two years ago but is getting better and better all the time and should be considered one of the most accurate for the medium to larger websites.

Website Analysis

Beyond the actual amount of traffic, there are other ways you can analyze your competition. There is the Search Engine Optimization and the information about the actual website themselves which can provide useful details about your competition.

siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

This s is a great tool which will let you explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. You can see the most popular pages from any website, and find pages that link to that site or any other page and see how popular they are. This is particularly good for smaller website and those looking to make a website themselves as you can find who is linking to your competitors.

DomainTools

DomainTools provides a useful set of services for getting all the information about a domain and who exactly owns them. There are some premiums tools that you need to pay for to get more detailed and historical information that will even bypass some privacy laws, but there is plenty for free which will be of good use. You can find out who is behind domains and even who has registered domain names that are wrongly spelled versions of you.

There really are some fantastic tools available completely free which will help anyone with a website or thinking of setting up one keep a decent enough track of their competition. The accuracy of some may be questioned and they should only really be used as an indicator but there is enough there to give you a very good idea of who are your competition and how well they are doing.

It is important to mention that the best toll to keep track of your competition is yourself. See what they are offering, see what they have got and look at ways in which you can improve your own website to stay ahead. This can be anything from the design, the name, the SEO and the content. Whatever it is monitoring the competition is an integral part of you deciding to make a website and it being a success.