SEO Snooping is the practice of “spying” (doing research) on the off-site optimization of your online competitors. If you have any questions regarding the difference between off-site and on-site optimization feel free to check out our article on the subject.

There are several great web-based tools for doing research regarding the status of a website’s off-site optimization. In this article we will look at one of my favorites, MarketLeap.com. MarketLeap.com provides three excellent free tools to aid you in your research.

The first of these tools is their “Link Popularity Check”. If you enter a domain name then this tool will tell you how many inbound links a site has. Please keep in mind that different search engines have their own “spiders” which “crawl” the web searching for links between sites. For this reason it is possible that MSN will report that your chosen site has more or less inbound links then say Google.

Since one way inbound links, also known as backlinks, have in recent memory been very important in the algorithms of most major search engines, it is important to have an idea of how many such links your competitors have.

What may be even more important than just the number of these inbound links is the quality / source of these links. The source of your competitor’s backlinks, especially if he is dominant in the search rankings for a particular niche, should be closely studied.

The second of these tools is MarketLeap.com’s “Search Engine Saturation” tool. This tool allows you to see how many of a website’s pages have been indexed by a particular search engine. Once again, since different search engines have different spiders and different algorithms, each engine is likely to report a different number of indexed pages.

The third tool of MarketLeap.com is its “Keyword Verification” tool; this tool allows you to check how a particular site ranks for a given “keyphrase”. The term keyphrase here simply refers to one or more keywords used together to form a search query. For example “search engine marketing” is a keyphrase that consists of the three keywords “search”, “engine” and “marketing”.

This third tool is essential since after all, search engine traffic is the result a search engine user searching for a particular “keyphrase”. Keep in mind that the work of search engine optimization is almost always conducted with specific “keyphrases” in mind.

Your competitors are not the only sites that you should be checking out; in addition I would suggest that you research the sites of SEO experts. It is one thing to carry out the steps that a particular expert suggests his students use; it is another thing to discover for yourself exactly what techniques they use for their own projects. As we like to say here at Feedback Secrets, do as I do, and not as I say.

The search engines adjust and alter their algorithms very often, for this reason if you are planning to research the sites of SEO experts, it is better to look at their most recent sites then sites they were actively promoting in the past. Their most recent work may be your best glimpse into the latest discoveries of these experts.