A Shortcut In Your SEO Research – Learn From Your Competitors
A smart marketer can learn a lot from their high ranking competitors. Simply search for the main keywords you ant to rank for and visit the top 3-5 websites for each term. While on their website use the “View Source” option- this displays the HTML code of the website, including the metadata (generally a title, description and keywords they’ve included to help the search engines understand what their page is about).
Now, write down those keywords in a spreadsheet. Secondly, use the Google Keyword Tool to analyze these sites; this should provide you with a large list of associated keywords, from which you should group accordingly. For example, if your keywords revolve around travel deals, sort them into the following groups : “last minute travel deals,” “travel deals to Italy” and “travel deals online.”
A this point, you should have a large number of keywords. However, search engines prefer webpages that have keywords and several synonyms as well. This makes sense: if you were writing about hip hop songs, you would probably include the terms “rap” and “music” whereas a spammer would include only the keyword they were optimizing for. This is known as semantically related phrases, and should be included in your SEO efforts. If you’re stuck on which terms to use, visit Quintura, which provides a list of related terms for your keyword. Be sure to add these keywords to your spreadsheets .
Your keyword list is almost complete. The final step is to revisit your competitors sites and note the most commonly used two, three and four word phrases –also known as “long tail keywords”- and add them to your list.
This is a very simple approach to keyword research and only takes an hour to do. For most smaller websites, try to build a list of at least 100 keywords you would want to optimize your site over. Search engine optimization is a long term approach, but by leveraging your competitors research you can get your efforts up and running in no time.
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