When optimizing your site, it is good to stay ahead of your ‘enemies’. What better way then to take a peek at your competitors’ sites, their traffic, their visitors and their visitors’ behaviour. There are a lot of tools / sites on the internet that can be useful when you want to spy around a bit. Here is my personal top 5 :

Top 5 Spy Tools:

1. Compete.com
2. Alexa.com
3. Comscore.com
4. Hitwise.com
5. Netratings.com

Competes data are based on a community of 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users and this seems by far the largest of these five metric giants. And, to me, having the largest community (user base) means the most trustworthy range of data. And that’s what we are looking for.

Just visit Competes site and check out some of the online tools they have. I really liked the Site Analysis Tool. You can check out a lot of cool data here, compare sites to one another for example. I did a check on Google, Yahoo and MSN and looked at some astonishing results. We all know that Google is by far the biggest Search Engine, but if we look at the results of this particular check Yahoo has a lot more (return) visits. Can anyone explain this one to me please?

Be sure to also have a look at the ‘Current Promotions’ section on the right of the screen at Competes site. Here you can see which site has what deals running, if they have any. Perfect to find a deal to use yourself or to promote as an affiliate!

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