Figuring out the best keywords to use

ronano

I'm not sure really what to post

I understand the concept of seo,i've read seomoz and googles own material on it. I feel like a half blind man fumbling with it, is it possible to see a competitors keywords/what is drawing traffic to their site?

The idea of backlinks,does it have to be a clickable link that directs to your site or can it just be normal text. If it needs to be clickable do you need to write a specific code around the webpage link?

They're the main two bothering me

any advice be greatly appreciated

PaulPinnacle

ronano wrote: »

is it possible to see a competitors keywords/what is drawing traffic to their site?

There are various tools out there that allow you to do competitive analysis, but obviously the information available is going to be limited and not comparable to what you can obtain for your own site.

It really depends on what specific information you're looking to obtain and personal preference as to which would be the most suitable. There are various SEO tools that will allow onpage analysis (allowing you to see which keywords a page is optimised for) and rough traffic figures can be obtained through the likes of alexa, compete and SEMrush (though a huge caveat over the accuracy of any figures obtained).

ronano wrote: »

The idea of backlinks,does it have to be a clickable link that directs to your site or can it just be normal text. If it needs to be clickable do you need to write a specific code around the webpage link?

A backlink must be clickable, if it's just plain text it's a citation (which does have a value, even if not to the same extent as a backlink).

What you might need to write around the link will depend on what site you're using. Some sites may require you to encode links in specific tags, if you want specific anchor text (the old bestest forum in Ireland style link) you'll certainly have to encode it (the 'how' will again depend on the site in question) but most will convert a simple http://www.boards.ie/ into a clickable link for you automatically.

ronano

thanks for the reply and info

bascially im just trying to see what keywords they are using to get the most traffic and you've completely cleared up backlinking for me.

Greatly appreciated

study68

you can use google keyword tool for keyword suggestion. although, you will find many tools available online for keyword suggestion and competition analysis etc.

Paul

disguised links removed

brian duffy

one way to see what keywords your competitors is with alexa (as mentioned previously), go to alexa.com, enter your competitors URL and go to traffic sources.

Visit their website and see what words appear in the title and heading of the homepage

You can also see how many backlinks your competitors have on backlinkwatch.com. If you go through their backlinks you can also see the anchor text for each link. If they have submitted their site to directories you will see which keywords they were optimizing for

davepredict

A simple way to look for keywords is to look what google suggests in the search box and at the bottom of the page.

I use these as a starting point then use Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Insights to get data.

Relevance is the most important thing, then search volume and then competition.

Use Keyword tool and the number of search results in Google as a gauge for competition.

A good strategy is to pick the most relavent keyword phrase for the page then use modifiers to narrow it down. For instance if you are selling fushing rods in Dublin for a range of ages...

Fishing Rods Dublin
Professional Fishing Rods
Junior Fishing Rods

Hope this helps

Baidin

try opensiteexplorer.org (OSE) from seomoz, that'll give you a list of links to your competitor site. The link anchor text is likely to be made up of the keywords they are targeting. OSE will also show you where your competitors strongest links come from and might identify link opportunities for you.