There are two rules in life that can be applied to just about every aspect of business:
1. Know yourself.
2. Know your competition.

Use our free SEO tools at www.lteren.com to help you to know yourself, that is, to gauge your success with keywords in marketing your business on the Internet.

Check out your current placement for the first 20 pages on Google for any keyword. Do it as often as you like. You can gauge how well you are able to retain your ranking for that keyword.

If your website does not show up in the first 20 pages, there may be a few reasons. Let us focus on two reasons that are not necessarily your fault:

1.Your competition is around a lot longer. Search Engines
tend to reward those sites who have registered quite a while
back and allow them to keep their ranking as long as their keyword
scoring is similar to newer sites.

You basically have to wait until the competition changes
their site and organic content and hope for the best.

2. Landed Page Value is also tough to compete against. If
you are an inexpensive setup going up against deeper pockets, the
competition may have business relationships that allow them to
place many external links in their home page source code.

An example of this is where a company belongs to an electronic
shopping mall. They will have their own branded site but will
be linked to a cluster of other unique enterprises that are a
franchisee of the electronic mall operator. Search engines
give greater weighted value to the other site because they
appear to have many more landed pages. It gives the impression
that the site is a much bigger operation and will get the higher
ranking.

The second free tool focuses on the rule that states that one should know who their competitors are. Enter any keyword and see the list of websites in the first 50 positions. You may then click on any of the 50 sites and the tool will tell you up to 10 Meta Name keywords assigned by the web designer, if the information is properly made available in the source code.

One should note that it is open to debate as to whether the major search engines use the Meta Name keywords in scoring your ranking. But, it is handy information to know as it tells you what your competition thinks is important in assigning keywords.