Last week we went through and made sure there were no broken links in our site. This week we will focus on choosing better keywords for our site by finding out what keywords competitor sites are using. General Sun Tzu in his book The Art of War was quoted for saying “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster”. The same wisdom from 500 BC applies for website owners even today.

Upon my travels on the Internet I find a lot of interesting services. Some free, some paid. This week I tested out a service called KeywordSpy. As the quote from Sun Tzu implies knowing your enemy and what keywords they are using can help you better improve your own sites keywords.

This week you should go out and find 3 comparable sites to your own. Once you have the domains of your competitors go to the KeywordSpy site and where it says ‘Begin your free keyword search here’ enter the domain (make sure you have no http:// or www. at the beginning of the domain). Click on the Go button and it will show you 10 of the results. Copy down the results and do the same for the other 2 domains. If you want a more comprehensive list of the keywords you will need to upgrade to the full version.

Once you have your list determine which ones you want to add to your own site. Next week we will cover how to use these keywords more effectively then just adding them to the header section of your site.

Do you think it would be immoral to use this type of tool on your competitor?

As always if you get stuck let me know in the comments.