Posts tagged Competitors
12 Steps to Audit Your Competitor’s SEO – Business 2 Community
Dec 31st
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12 Steps to Audit Your Competitor's SEO
Business 2 Community Couple that with the fact that the algorithm itself constantly changes and you potentially have a daunting task in auditing competitors' websites for SEO. The recommended SEO audit approach is to focus on just a few well vetted attributes. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
5 Things Dropbox Competitors Need
Dec 30th
I got all excited this morning when I saw a link on Hacker News to BitPocket, one of the latest so-called “DIY Dropbox” offerings that’s open source. The excitement faded pretty quickly when I hit the GitHub repo and found that it’s just a “small but smart script that does 2-way directory synchronization” without most of the Dropbox features.
Dropbox didn’t get where it is today by being a wrapper for rsync, Git, Unison or any of the other open source tools for file synchronization. If you want to replicate Dropbox’s suceess, there’s a few features that are mandatory.
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Top-Notch Synchronization
The biggest failing that Bitpocket has is the lack of automatic sync. As I’m writing this post (in Vim, using Markdown on my MacBook Pro), Dropbox is syncing it with my iMac and my Linux Mint computer as well as with the Dropbox service.
It’s doing it silently, without any intervention or extra setup on my part. Before Dropbox, I used rsync over SSH to sync my files to rsync.net and my other computers. It was workable, but not particularly convenient. It took about ten minutes for me to decide to plunk down the monthly fee for Dropbox after discovering the LAN sync feature in Dropbox.
Platform Ubiquity
Another feature that any Dropbox challenger needs? Platform ubiquity. If it doesn’t run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS and Android, I’m not interested.
Technically, I’m actually OK with a service that doesn’t run on Windows, but the sheer number of folks who use Windows means that any Dropbox alternative is pretty much DOA without a Windows client. And there’s very little attraction to any tool that doesn’t sync with my mobile device.
Web Access
If I’m not on a computer I control, I still want to be able to get to a file in a pinch. Dropbox’s Web interface is perfect for the few times I don’t have my own computer handy, or haven’t gotten around to installing Dropbox yet. Since I tend to do a lot of testing, it’s not uncommon for me to set up a new box without wanting to hassle with installing Dropbox when I’m going to be wiping a system in a few days. (Not that Dropbox is all that hard to install.)
Revision Control and File Restore
Revision control and file restore are features I don’t use often, but are worth the price of Dropbox even if I use them just twice a year.
I admit it, I’ve fat-fingered rm once or twice in 2011, and saved over a file in LibreOffice that I didn’t mean to. Revision control and file restore mean that I’ve been able to recover gracefully with zero loss of data. Unless an alternative can give me that, I’m not switching.
Sharing
Finally, I need to be able to share files with co-workers and friends. Dropbox makes this dirt simple, even for other folks that don’t use Dropbox.
Falling Short
Bitpocket and other sync scripts and tools may be acceptable for some use cases, but they don’t rise to the “Dropbox” label. Up-and-coming projects like SparkleShare may be nifty collaboration tools, but they’re not a Dropbox replacement.
I’d love to see an open source, DIY alternative to Dropbox, but so far none have come close.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
cognitiveSEO Launches Advanced SEO Toolkit to Outrank Competitors – PR Web (press release)
Dec 8th
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cognitiveSEO Launches Advanced SEO Toolkit to Outrank Competitors
PR Web (press release) cognitiveSEO launches SEO Toolkit to help webmasters, marketers and agencies create stronger link building strategies and outrank competitors faster and easier. Besides the core functionality of the product which is the inBound Link Analysis, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Analyzing Organic Competitors: How to Dissect Your Marketplace
Nov 14th
Businesses love to know what their competition is doing. It’s probably one of the most frequently asked questions by companies that want to improve their organic program.
If you’re optimizing a client’s site then you know the d…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
PubCon Live: Competitors from the Darkside – Rogue SEO Tactics – Search Engine Roundtable
Nov 10th
 Search Engine Roundtable |
PubCon Live: Competitors from the Darkside – Rogue SEO Tactics
Search Engine Roundtable Below is live coverage of the Competitors from the Darkside – Rogue SEO Tactics panel from the PubCon 2011 conference. Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Tips For Spying On Your PPC Competitors
Aug 22nd
Spying is such a loaded word, isn’t it? Spying evokes images of stakeouts on dark streets, dumpster diving to dig up old phone records, elaborate electronic eavesdropping and bugged lampshades. In the corporate world, we prefer to use the softer, more professional reference to competitive…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Google VP Accuses Competitors of “Attacking” Android with Patents
Aug 3rd
In a surprisingly candid move, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond published an opinionated post on the company’s official blog contending that its Android mobile operating system is under “attack” from a “hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.”
Drummond’s post is in reference to last week’s sale of Nortel’s patent portfolio to a consortium of Google’s competitors. The purchase of these patents threatens Android’s dominant share of the smartphone OS market by making the operating system more expensive for phone manufacturers to license.
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Drummond calls this consortium’s strategy “anti-competitive,” contending that the winning $4.5 billion bid inflated the price of the patents “way beyond what they’re really worth,” which pushed the portfolio out of Google’s reach. He’s not the only one who feels that way; federal antitrust officials are investigating the deal.
Pending the outcome of antitrust investigations, it’s clear that this deal puts Google and Android on the defensive. Google’s position to license its mobile OS across a wide range of platforms is both a blessing and a curse. The range of options for consumers has helped Android net nearly 50% of the smartphone market, but if the cost of licensing becomes prohibitive to cash-strapped hardware manufacturers, that market will dry up quickly, and the profits for Android software developers will go right along with it. Apple doesn’t have to worry about such margins, and other phone manufacturers might have to start building side businesses on WebOS or Windows Phone 7 to remain profitable, which is just what HP and Microsoft have been waiting for.
Meanwhile, Google and Apple are said to be squaring off to duel over another large patent portfolio owned by InterDigital. Patents were intended to protect innovation, but they’re certainly proving costly and distracting to the software industry’s leading innovators.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
SEO Strategy: How to Capitalize on Your Competitor’s Mistakes – Search Engine Watch
Jul 27th
 Search Engine Watch |
SEO Strategy: How to Capitalize on Your Competitor's Mistakes
Search Engine Watch In addition to high-level strategy, keynotes, an expo floor with 100+ companies, networking events, and parties, you don't want to miss out on the latest trends and strategies during sessions on SEO, PPC management, social media, keyword research, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Learn From Your Competitors’ Google AdSense Mistakes With MixRank
Jul 1st
When setting up Google AdWords campaigns, it can pretty difficult to guess which ad copy is going to perform the best. Sometimes even the tiniest, most unexpected changes can have a dramatic impact on ad performance. But how do you know what will be most effective?
A new Y Combinator-backed startup called MixRank wants to help take some of the guesswork out the process. The self-described “spy tool for contextual and display ads” offers businesses a glimpse at AdSense campaigns being run by other companies and shows which ones had the best performance.
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MixRank indexes more than 93,000 sites running Google AdSense ads and figures out things like how many publishers ran the ad, when it was last seen, how frequently it’s displayed and what it’s average position in AdSense blocks is. It also breaks down top traffic sources for that site.
In the above example using ads run by Mint.com, you can see that the ad for “Personal Budget Worksheet” vastly outperformed the ad for “Family Budget Spreadsheet.”
For small businesses especially, such a tool can be hugely valuable for better allocating those limited ad dollars and putting energy into the types of ad copy and traffic sources that will yield the highest ROI.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
