(Free) How to find site keywords of competitors
May 5, 2009
Do you ever wonder why some junk blogs with seemingly nonsense content appear to have more visitors than your site? Do you sometimes find yourself asking how these blogs get a lot of traffic from search engines?
The answer most likely lies in the keywords those sites are targeting and the search engine optimization (SEO) techniques they implement.
You see, when a person uses a search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN, he or she normally first clicks on the highest-ranked links on the first pages of the search results. So if you can get your site to rank on top of those search results, the higher your chance is of getting more visitors from search engines.
That, in short, is what search engine optimization or SEO is all about. We’re not here to talk about SEO tips and tricks because, honestly, we don’t know how best to do it.
But one way to trump your competitor sites is to know what keywords they are targeting and to be ahead of them in the keywords game on the search engines.
The $1-million-question now is:
How to Check the Keywords of Competitor Sites?
There are several free and easy ways to do it. Here are some of them.
- Check the Meta Keywords tag of the site
Look at the HTML source code of the site and, most of the time, there you will see the keywords that site wants to rank high on. In Mozilla Firefox, you can do this by going to View > Page Source while in Internet Explorer, this is the View > Source command.
In the source code, search for the meta keywords tag which normally takes the following form:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword,keyword,keyword phrase,keyword”>
- Use online free sites that show keywords
There are a number of free sites that give a possible listing of keywords a particular site is targeting. These include Busby, URLTrends and KeywordSpy, among others. However, they provide only limited information. There are a number of paid sites available but you have to shell out some cash to get useful data.
- Use Alexa
The best free and easy way we discovered that shows the keywords of a site is through Alexa. Just type the URL of the site you want to check on Alexa’s search engine and you will see a variety of useful info about a particular site. You can even compare the stats of a number of sites. This same statistics is what we use to rank the Top Blogs in the Philippines.
The keywords driving traffic to a site can be seen under the “Keywords” section in Alexa. This list is even updated monthly which means you can check if the keywords of your competitor site are changing.
An example of keywords analysis of popular Philippine newspaper site Inquirer.net is shown on the screenshot above.
Hope these tips will help you identify the keywords of your competitor sites. Good luck competing with them on the search engines!
May 6th, 2009 at %I:%M %p
this is a very good point to make. I have often wonder how to check someones keywords, so thank you for this peice of information.
May 6th, 2009 at %I:%M %p
Nice information James! I’ve been using the Alexa tool though.
May 7th, 2009 at %I:%M %p
Great tip, thanks again James! Isn’t it true that even if a site did manage to get visitors by targeting high traffic keywords, the bounce rate would eventually be very high if the content is not really what the visitor was looking for? As they say “Content is King!”. =)
I wonder how Alexa gets information on demographics.
May 8th, 2009 at %I:%M %p
Very timely tong post mo James, I’ve been looking for a free keyword tracking service. I would suggest keywordspy up to 10 lang yung free pero swak na swak, i confirm mo pa sa Google Keyword Tool yun talaga yung mga high-ranking keywords. You will know your competitor’s kewords. About the source code, ok din yun pero kung gusto mo ng madalian, keywordspy works.Another great post, keep posting!
May 9th, 2009 at %I:%M %p
@Izzy, you’re welcome!
@Millionaire Acts, the Alexa tool is really helpful. Although it may not be a perfect system, at least it gives a vaiety of useful data about sites.
@Jay, that’s true. Actually, bloggers in some sites don’t put a lot of useful info hoping that users will click on the ads instead. When that happens and if the keyword is a high-paying keyword, the site owner gets to earn. I think that’s what they are banking on.
@jonharules, tried KeywordSpy before pero mukhang outdated yung lumalabas sa free version nila. Parang keywords na tinatarget ng isang site several months o years ago. Siguro sa paid version nila, updated. Anyway, will still put that in the list of free keyword checkers in the article. Thanks!