How can we define our competition?

There are some handy search commands provided by Google which allow you to assess your competition fairly accurately.
The format of these commands is very simple:
command:keyword phrase

• Finding the Anchor link text used by competitors. In the Keyword Research lesson we discussed how we can use a simple query with our keyword phrase in quotation marks to asses the number of other pages competing for that exact keyword term(s). Now we will take this concept a step further and use Google's built in search commands, the "allinanchor", and "allintitle" commands.
  
  The Google "allinanchor" command will find all the websites using the specified keyword phrase in internal or external link text (anchor text). The anchor text is the visible part of a link.
  
  For example a link to our own site www.trendmx.com would look like this:
  
  SEO Software
  
  The HTML code would be formatted this way.
  

  <a href="http://www.trendmx.com">SEO Software</a>

 

The keyword "SEO Software" is the anchor text in this case linking to our site highlighted in blue.

You can include the keyword phrase in the "allinanchor" command with or without quotation marks. The internal and external link text is an important ranking factor on all the major search engines and the "allinanchor" command helps us find all those sites that have a solid internal and external linking strategy. Ranking high with the "allinanchor" command usually means a high natural search engine ranking as well.

• Finding the Title tag used by competitors: The "allintitle" command works similarly to the "allinanchor" command, but instead it searches the title tag of web pages for the keyword phrase entered. The title tag is used to describe a web page's content in 60-90 characters and it's one of the most important on-page optimization element for you to master. Most of the top ranking competitors have well optimized title tags and the "allintitle" command helps you find those top ranking competitors who have the most relevant title tags.
   

Let's do a search for "allinanchor:second mortgage" with the "allinanchor" special Google query operator. Google reports over 90 thousand web pages using the keyword term "second mortgage" in their internal and external link text. Although the number of results returned may not mean much to you just yet, but the "allinanchor" and "allintitle" Google commands are the most important to measure your competitors' strength.

The Google search results returned for the "allinanchor" keyword phrase "second mortgage", over 90 thousand results reported.