All companies want to succeed in business and success is defined in a multitude of ways. How companies perceive their success is individual through their visions, values and goals. How companies achieve success is universally the same. All companies become successful by growing market share. The million dollar question is how do you grow your market share and how can the internet help you?

To grow your market share through your website you first have to know who your competition is and what they are doing on the internet to grab market share. Identifying your competition is easy with the internet using Google as a search engine searching for similar products or services to your own, or searching your local online yellow pages and publications for relevant links.

Once you have your competitor information the internet can be an invaluable resource to help you grow your market share. To use the competitor information you first have to know which of your competitors achieve the most traffic to their site. Afterall you don't want to emulate the style of the losing team! To know which of your competitors are the most or least successful and where your company fits into this graph you need to go to a traffic estimate site. These traffic estimate sites, such as trafficestimate.com, give you invaluable information in plotting who has the highest and lowest visits over a given period. Once you know which of your competitors gets the most traffic to their site you can start the process of search engine optimisation (SEO). Primarily this means sending more traffic to your website and not your competitors by ranking you higher on the search results.

Once you know what ranking your competitors are at you can find out how they optimised their sites starting with back links, how many places are linking to their sites in comparison to you. Find out how many of their pages have been indexed by other search engines such as Google. Search their content to select ten keywords and find out how well those words are ranked on the major search engines. Do your competitors use META description tags to show a more appropriate description on their listing? Do your competitors tell the search engines, are the Google spiders encouraged by the directions listed in the robots.txt file?

Of course the key to sending more people your way is still making sure you have a professional website that is not only SEO friendly but also user friendly. Your customers have to be able to look at a site that is easy to navigate with quality content. Make sure you provide your customers with easy to access information by making sure your menus and page titles are easy to read. If your customers can't find their way round your site with a few clicks they will just go somewhere else!

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Jason Walker is the owner and operator of TrafficEstimate.com - http://www.trafficestimate. com, which is the best site on the internet for web site traffic estimation.