My cousin was asking me last night how he would be able to make his online store more popular because he seems to keep on getting small number of people visiting his site. He was asking for search engine optimisation advice and wanted me to tell him how it works. He knows for a fact that words play major role on it but he is still not sure. I told him that if he already has the good keywords, the next step would be to know his competitors. It is a highly true fact that search engines evaluate arriving links to the web sites as part of ranking site criteria. Basically, if he knows how many incoming links his competitors have, he would definitely get an out of this world edge over them. But then again, as I have told him, he still has to discover his rivals before he can start analyzing them. The old saying “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” runs perfectly on this since knowing what your competitors have is far more important than knowing what possible partners have. I just told him that he can get more people visiting his site if he has more than his competitors when it comes to searchable words.