FP - do you know what keywords are your competitors using?

**happyfrancis** · January 25th, 2011, 7:00 AM

Your keywords is one of the basic building blocks in order to improve your search engine ranking but then knowing your competitors targeted keyword would certainly give you an advantage....

this is a basic procedure that we normally forget... so here is how you do it.

1.) Go to your competitors website using any browsers but i would prefer google chrome.

2.) go to the menu bar of your browser and look for tools.

3.) once you are in the tools option select view page source.

4.) Now a lot of codes would appear just try and look for a code that states /><meta name="Keywords" content

5.) Bingo! All the words after the /><meta name="Keywords" content are your competitors keywords.

**Thomas** · January 26th, 2011, 6:57 AM

I'm not usually bothered about the keywords my competitors are targeting on-site - as it doesn't usually show what they actually rank for. Just because they target it on site doesn't mean there's merit in their keyword research.

I usually just find the keywords I want to rank for the most and then go from there (by traffic/relevance). Reverse engineer their backlinks, build better/more backlinks and so on. We tend to be quite aggressive and target the best keywords in our niche, start with the long-tails and move up from there.

**irnwho** · January 26th, 2011, 6:59 AM

Thomas,

What programs etc do you use to reverse engineer?

What do you use to build links?

I just want to see how you go about doing that kind of thing.

**Thomas** · January 26th, 2011, 7:04 AM

Originally Posted by irnwho

Thomas,

What programs etc do you use to reverse engineer?

What do you use to build links?

I just want to see how you go about doing that kind of thing.

We're not that big on SEO, but would use a variety of programs (all free). Backlinkwatch is sometimes a good start to get a good idea. Or my very basic way is just to Google their domain and find out who's ranking for it - usually means they've had a guest blog or something similar. I'll then approach the owners and get the very same deal.

Tool wise - I have Scrapebox and a few others but we tend to outsource all of our SEO these days. The people who do our SEO use a variety of tools and manual link-building techniques. SEO isn't my area of expertise, so I'd rather outsource to someone who knows what they are doing and does it for a living.

**Luka** · January 26th, 2011, 7:21 AM

Concentrate on your own site more than you concentrate on other sites.

What you would want to do is if you have a though competitor, use Yahoo Site Explorer to find your competitor's backlinks, and then simply build the same backlinks as he did, and then build the rest your own way. So you will have what he has, but MORE.

**Imminentdomains** · February 2nd, 2011, 2:42 AM

Scrapebox tells me very quickly all the links to any site I want to know about.

Oh yeah, and I am able to sort them and filter based on PR,Root and other goodies!

**millionaireman** · February 2nd, 2011, 8:13 AM

I usually use this if I want to save time and check on what keywords are we competing for, this would help me determine if other possible keywords that are not yet tapped by my competitor website. I only check the keywords of website who are already established and from there it would give me glimpse on how did they optimized their website to rank high on such keyword.