Before I do any work on a website I try to get an idea of where it fits into the grand scheme of things on the World Wide Web. The easiest way to do this is to run searches for some of the competitive terms in the website’s niche. If you imagine the Internet as one giant city, you can picture domains as buildings. The first step I take before working on a client’s website is figuring out in which neighborhood its building (domain) resides.
This search result page is similar to seeing a map of the given Internet neighborhood. You usually can quickly identify the neighborhood anchors (due to their link popularity) and specialists in the top 10 (due to their relevancy). You can also start to get an idea of the maturity of the result based on the presence of spam or low- quality websites.
search result for “advertising”
Notice the difference in the maturity (quality) of the search results. In the second set of results, you see some of the same big names again (Wikipedia, for example, appears in both searches) but this time they are mixed with some sites that appear spammier (iab.net, freewebdirectory.us).
During client meetings, when I look at the search engine result page for a competitive term like advertising, I am not looking for websites to visit but rather trying to get a general idea of the maturity of the Internet neighborhood. I am very vocal when I am doing this and have been known to question out loud, “How did that website get there?” A couple times, the client momentarily thought I was talking about his website and had a quick moment of panic. In reality, I am commenting on a spam site I see rising up the results.
To turn this off, append “&pws=0” to the end of the Google URL.
Also, take note that regardless of whether or not you are logged into a Google account, the search engine will automatically customize your search results based on links you click most. This can be misleading because it will make your favorite websites rank higher for you than they do for the rest of the population.
search result for “Internet advertising”
Along with looking at the results themselves, I look at the other data present on the page. The amount of advertisements on the search result gives a rough idea of how competitive it is. For example, a search for buy viagra will return a full page height worth of ads, whereas a search for womenthat look like Drew Carey won’t likely return any. This is because more people are searching for the blue pill than are searching for large, bald women with nerd glasses.
In addition to the ads, I also look for signs of temporal algorithms. Temporal algorithms are ranking equations that take into account the element of time with regards to relevancy. These tend to manifest themselves as news results and blog posts.
Taking Advantage of Temporal Algorithms 
You can use the temporal algorithms to your advantage. I accidentally did this once with great success. I wrote a blog post about Michael Jackson’s death and its effect on the search engines a day after he died. As a result of temporal algorithms my post ranked in the top 10 for the query “Michael Jackson” for a short period following his death. Because of this high ranking, tens of thousands of people read my article. I thought it was because I was so awesome, but after digging into my analytics I realized it was because of unplanned use of the temporal algorithms. If you are a blogger, this tactic of quickly writing about news events can be a great traffic booster.
After scanning search result pages for the given website’s niche, I generally get a sense for that neighborhood of the Internet. The important takeaway is to get an idea of the level of competition, not to figure out the ins and outs of how specific websites are ranking. That comes later.
Easy De-Personalization in Firefox and Chrome
Most SEOs perform searches dozens or hundreds of times per day, and when you do, it’s important that de-personalized results appear so that you see what a “typical” searcher would see, as opposed to search results influenced by you own search history.
Firefox is a terrific browser for SEOs for many reasons, but one of its most helpful features is the ability to search right from the address field of the browser, the area at the top of the browser where you normally see the URL of the web page you’re on. Better yet, with a little customization, you can easily perform Google searches that are de-personalized (although not de-geotargeted).
1. From the Bookmarks | Organize Bookmarks… menu, select any bookmarks folder in the left pane. (Do not simply select the All
Bookmarks folder, because it won’t work.)
2. Right-click the folder and select New Bookmark… 
3. Add the following values to the fields:
Name: Google de-personalized search
Tags: (Optional. Add any tags you want.)
Keyword: g
Description: (Optional. Use this to describe the search.)
4. Click Add. 
That’s it. Now, go to the Address field in Firefox (where you see a URL at the top of the browser) and type something like this: 
g hdmi cables 
This tells Google (g) to search for “hdmi cables”. More important, because your Location field included &pws=0, that URL parameter will carry over to your search result. From now on, if you want to perform a de-personalized Google search, simply type “g” (no quotes) and the query term from your URL field.
Use this process for creating as many custom searches as you like, keeping these important factors in mind:
1. The Location field must contain the exact URL of the search result, with the exception of the %s variable, which will be replaced with your query term automatically.
2. The Keyword field is where you’ll type before your search query to tell Firefox which custom query you’ll be running. Be brief and accurate. I use terms like “b” for Bing, “tc” for text cache, and so on.
This functionality carries over to Google’s Chrome browser too, because Chrome can import bookmarks from any other browser you use. If you’re a Chrome user, simply import your Firefox bookmarks from the Chrome | Import Bookmarks and Settings menu, and you can search from the Chrome address bar just like you did in Firefox.
Action Checklist
When viewing a website from the 1,000-foot level, be sure to complete the following: Search for the broadest keyword that the given site might potentially rank Identify the maturity of the search engine results page (SERP) based on the criteria listed in this chapter Identify major competitors and record them in a list for later competitive analysis.
This section discussed analyzing websites at their highest level. At this point, the details don’t matter. Rather it is macro patterns that are important. The following sections dive deeper into the website and figure out how everything is related. Remember, search engines use hundreds of metrics to rank websites. This is possible because the same website can be viewed many different ways.