I stumbled across one of the coolest tools to research a website’s competition. The product is called “Navigator” by TouchGraph. It’s a tool that I’ve incorporated as a staple in my SEO research toolbag.

One of the very critical parts of forming a decent SEO plan for a website is to do research on the niche that your site serves. There are MANY tools out there that get you the data, but this is the only/best one that lets you visualize it and work with it on-the-fly.

One of the central concepts of search engine ranking and SEO in general is the niche hub. Bruce Clay, an authoritative SEO professional has been talking about this for years, and there have been many experiments done that prove the importance hubs. Hubs are esentially subsections of the internet based on a specific niche or topic. For the sake of this example, I’m going to use the niche of “HalifaxNS” – a fairly narrow niche – but the same concept applies for something as broad as “billiards” or “cars” as a niche.

Esentially, when you have a niche that you are trying to develop an SEO game plan for, you need to know who the main authority sites (hub sites) are for your niche. This visualization tool does exactly that…you’ll see the most popular sites inside the bigger circles.  ONE word of caution, however, is that the more obscure the niche (like halifax) the more weird and/or invalid results you’ll see. Even still, with that problem, Navigator is still the best SEO visulization tool available on the net today.

This post focuses on their Navigator product, but they have a bunch of others, including one that shows hubs on Amazon’s shopping site (by ASIN), and another that shows hubs on facebook (by Member) – Very Cool.