The most competitive arena in our modern world is sport. The Olympics Games is watched by a huge number of people. Salt Lake Winter Games sold 1.5 million tickets and was watched by 2.1 billion television viewers, Sydney sold 6.7 million tickets and Athens sold 3.8 million tickets and it is expected that there will be about 10 500 athletes in Beijing competing. Each competitor spends approximately 10 years in preparing for the event that they will be competing in which may last all of a few minutes.

Part of each athlete�s preparation is to understand the competition, knowing their strengths and weaknesses. This is especially true of football games where coaches will sit for hours watching videos of a competing team past games. They analyze and pick holes in their game which will allow them to devise a strategy to beat their competitor.

A website also has competitors and every webmaster should be aware of who the websites competition are. So how can a webmaster monitor the competition? The first way is to have a look which websites are where you want to be.

Record there name and web address. Have a look at their PR, title tag, description and keywords. Look at the code for the site to identify the complexity of the site. Identify what keywords they are using in their copy.

Then look at it from a users point of view identifying what is being offered. What opt-in or pull in offers are available. Does the headline grab you and what benefit does it talk about?

Then see if it is possible to get some other stats on the site like what are they bidding on. A good site to have a look at is http://www.spyfu.com.

Once you know who the competition is and what they are doing it is easier to pick holes and do something better or different that will get you ahead of the competition. And in the very least do what they are doing to get you to a similar position of credibility.