Many things can be said about the benefits of having an online business. Inexpensive marketing platforms, a global audience, automation and the likes are just some of the top answers whenever online businessmen are asked why they decided to establish their enterprises in the World Wide Web.

But theres one factor that is often left undisclosed. The online field would also require you to compete with hundreds, if not thousands, of other businesses jockeying for the same market. Its a virtual race for sales, or for clicks if youre engaged in a PPC venture. And since any given market is finite, the number and strength of your competition plays an important role in determining your success in the internet marketing industry.

Competition is said to be at its highest level in the search engine game. As you may very well know, 80% of the traffic that can be generated from any website would come from the search engines. If you are competing with 100 other enterprises, this means that you should try your very best to beat all 100 of them for the top spot in the search engine results page for every relevant query. This is the best way to ensure that youll get first dibs on a prospect before they could grab a hold of him.

As is usually the case, search engine optimization (SEO) techniques abound to help you gain good position in search engine results. Mastering these techniques would give you a greater chance of succeeding in the online industry.

At least in theory.

In practice, however, things arent that easy. What remains unsaid is the fact that most of your competitors would be doing the same thing. Youd still have to compete with the tactics that they themselves would employ. And if all of you would be implementing the same strategies, then its back to square one. If you cant get ahead of them in the search engine positions before, theres no reason why youd get ahead of them after employing the same tricks that they likewise employ.

So what should you do?

Heres an unorthodox strategy. Instead of competing against your rivals, you could actually learn from them. And in the process, you could steal their spots.

Competition is always about figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents. The keys to victory lie in replicating what your opponents are doing correctly and correcting what your opponents are doing wrong.

And these can only be achieved by studying their performance.

Lets give it a shot through an example.

Supposing your online business has something to do with dog grooming. A cursory look at Google would reveal that you have around 10,000,000 pages servicing the same subject. An approximation based on averages would tell us that around 2.5 million webmasters are engaged in the same field.

On the number one spot in the search engine results would be petgroomer.com. This websites spot is your aim. Your goal is to dislodge this website from its number one position.

How are you supposed to do that?

Lets try to study the website. On your Internet browser, go to VIEW then select SOURCE. Youll be taken to a text file that would reveal the source code of the said website. Now study this source code and answer the following questions:

* Are you doing the SEO techniques the website is employing?
* What is the website implementing that youre not doing?
* What are you doing that the website is not implementing?

For example, the said website is employing META tags. Are you using the same META tags? Does he have more META tags than you do? The website also hosts a variety of content pieces. Are its content pieces better than yours? Are there any keywords in such pieces that you have failed to capitalize on? The said website is also using ALT tags. Are you using ALT tags for your pages with same level of proficiency?

Again, just as a reminder, the trick is to determine what your competitor is doing right so that youd know what to imitate, and to determine what your competitor is doing wrong so that youd know where to beat him.

Now go to www.linkpopularity.com and run a check on that websites URL. Youd know that the said website has 1,927 MSN back links and 2,760 Yahoo back links. The next step is to acquire more back links than what this website has. This is where you should employ off page SEO tactics so that youd be able to beat the aforementioned number one website. If you will manage to get more back links, then chances are, Google will consider assigning your website a higher page rank.

These are the secrets to studying and beating your competition, even if the playing field is fairly built. As Arie De Geus did say, the ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage.