Search Engines

Search engines convert online chaos into relative order. Without them, online research would be virtually impossible. You can use search engines to find information on practically anything to do with your e-business. The main search sites you should check out are listed below.

Google : www.google.com
Yahoo: www.yahoo.com
Alta Vista: www.altavista.com
Ask Jeeves: www.ask.com
Lycos: www.lycos.com

To find information on who your competitors are and what they are doing, when at the web site of one of these search engines, type the words you think people would use to get to a site like yours. Use as many different search engines as possible, because each will bring up different results. Also search on related industry portals and forums as well as visit your competitors sites to see what they are offering on their sites to see how big your online market is and how to fight with your competitors. You must always try to offer something unique that your competitors don’t offer. That will work as a value added service to your site. Look at the strengths and weakness of your rivals and how their sites are designed specially on the navigation system, are they easy to use?

Other things that you need to consider by visiting your competitors sites are Advertising, newsletters, interactivity, objectives, and traffic. Advertising means that are they allow others to place adds on their site. If there are advertisements then you have to try to contact them and get the details of their advertising rates. You must do this without let them knowing that you are a competitor; otherwise they will not give you the correct details. After this you can see what price you must set on your site for prospective adverts.

If there are a newsletter offering, then you must sign for their newsletter. In this case you can keep in touch about their new arrivals and pricing. Try to not to give your default email address because that could be a problem if they are not genuine.

Interactivity is that is there are enough details to contact them and is there a form to send your feedbacks to them. If there is a form try to send a feed back and see how quickly they respond.

Try to understand the site’s objectives, are they sells products online or just it is support for their offline business.

If there is a hit counter that list the number of visitors, see how it performs. But you can not entirely trust these hit counters because the site administrator can manually reset the counter to a higher level even there are no visitors are all. So just keep this as a number only but do not depend so much on this to make your decisions.

The other important factor is bookmark all interesting site you think you might want to visit regularly. You can do this using your web browser. This will help you to keep track of what your competitors doing, how often they upgrade their website and so on.