Certainly over the months or years you’ve been marketing your wares online, you’ve come across a few key competitiors that you’d love to keep tabs on.

Part of keeping in tune with the niche you are in is watching the competition to see what they’re up to. Visiting their site(s) all the time trying to find their new content can be a real pain.

Enter the wonderful site: command. This little ditty can be used to our advantage.

When you use the site: command, you are asking the search engine to list out all the pages that it has indexed for a website (well, not all of the pages, but close).

Google alerts, on the other hand, lets us know any time a new phrase or word shows up on the Internet. For instance, if I want to know who is mentioning me, I may run a Google Alert for the phrase “Will Hanke” (with the quotes, of course). Every time someone mentions me (hopefully in a good way), Google will index that page, and it will send me an alert letting me know about the new page, and will provide me a link to said site.

So we can use the alerts in this manner, but instead of being alerted to a certain phrase, we want to be alerted every time there is a change to the list of indexed sites Google has for our competitor.
First, sign up for Google Alerts

In the ‘Search Terms’ box, type this exactly as you see it: site:domain.com

The domain.com should be replaced with your competitors website URL. There are no spaces.

Keep the Type as ‘Comprehensive’

Set your preferences and email. Now any time there are new pages indexed by Google, they’ll send you an alert letting you know about it.

Keep in mind, search engines only crawl low-level pages every 4-6 weeks, so don’t expect a bunch of updates in your email. They’ll more likely trickle in, but at least you’ll know what’s new there!

Since I started out as a web designer back in the mid Nineties, I’ve long been involved in my local community. Since that’s where most designers find their clients, its only natural that these same people want to now help these companies promote their wares locally, and globally.

When I started out, I was doing static websites; just helping businesses get online. And I’d be willing to bet that most web designers are still that way. They don’t understand marketing. They don’t understand search. They don’t understand advertising, and they don’t want to. They want to make a set of pages, FTP them up, bill the client and move on.

This puts their client in a bad situation. So the client has this new (unoptimized, most likely) fancy website. Most small businesses put out a good chunk of change to get their sites built, and then they think the people will come. Build it and they will come, they think.

Not on the Internets, they won’t.

The ‘BIATWC’ mantra is a far cry from true on the world wide web. More like ‘Build it and no one will notice’ if you ask me. Web designers who are purely building websites and dumping them onto the web are doing their clients a huge disservice. Sure, they’re doing what they’re paid to do, they do good work, and they provide just what the client asked for.

The problem is that most designers really have no idea that they’re even doing this disservice. They have no idea what is involved in marketing a website, and (for the most part) they prefer to stay ignorant of those skills. They still tell their clients to supply them with ten keywords for the meta tag so they can rank well. And they’re the same ones that are still putting each state name in those tags, too.

So what’s the lesson here? Simple. Learn what you’re doing. Believe it or not, every web designer is also in marketing. That’s what you’re ultimately selling your client, right? Another way to market their business? So if you don’t know the marketing aspect of it, make sure (at the least) that you hand off your crappy code work to a professional SEO/SEM when you’re finished raping them for that fancy design.

Late last week on my way to the office, I needed to stop off for some gas. As I came to a stop at the exit ramp, I saw a small sign that said 100 Signs for 99c ea. There was a website, so I went to the site when I got to the office. The website didn’t mention the 99c special, so I wrote the company an email, and sure enough, they had a 99c special.

For some time now I’ve been wanting to promote my local forum, but I really don’t have the extra money to keep dumping into the site with little/no return. That all changed this week when I got a significant donation. It came at just the right time - so I ordered the signs.

A few details:

• Company: SignTee
• Price: $127 with shiping (Arizona to Missouri)
• Size: 12×18 (They also have 18×24 for only $165 + shipping)
• Stands: 39c each. I didn’t order them, because I think I can make wood stakes cheaper and staple the signs to them.
• Material: Coroplast
• Colors available: White or Yellow. I went with yellow.
• Amount I make off this post: $0

Now I sit and wait anxiously for my signs to come in. I’ll have to post a follow up (perhaps with pictures?) once I get the signs in place.

If you end up ordering some of these, tell the guy (Irving) that you heard it from me (Will)