Keywords

How do you know what keywords get the best results? And how do you find out what keywords your competition uses?

 

View their page source and search
<meta name="keywords" and you should find them

 

:o How do I veiw their page source?

ETA: Scrap that, I just found it

 

Thats the thing with keywords it isnt always what they are using that are best for your own site. You may want to use this tool which tells you estimates of the monthly search volume for most given sets of keywords:

Keyword Playground

 

Thank you i had a look at some of my competitors and got a few more to add to what i already had
That keyword playground looks good, will have to have a play around with that
Thank you so much for all your help.

 

There's a commercial service called WordTracker which will suggest some keywords and rank them in terms of how much they're already being used, how many people are searching for them etc. You can get a week long free trial.

Keyword Research Tools for SEO

 

Your keywords should be the topic of your site.

Your google webmaster tools will tell you how you are ranking in certain keywords. If you are not using your webmaster tools, you really should start.

 

I just started webmaster tools, and its given me a long list of the keywords google bots have picked up from my forum. How do I change these? And how can I find out how they rank and all stuff like that?

 

Google picks certain keywords from your forum, sometimes there is nothing you can do about it. Sometimes the keywords can be adjusted by using the anchor text in your backlinks. Sometimes they can be changed in the theme of the forum.

Lets say that your theme has certain things repeated over and over, google might pick those keywords up. Such as one SMF theme I was using, had "welcome guest" in the front of every thread title. So google picked up "welcome guest" as important keywords because they were repeated in the title of every thread. I was going to switch over to VB, so I did not take the time to fix it. However, it was one of the factors that made me speed up the switch over.

Typing in the site:site name in google will help tell you "how" google sees your site. So you should do that and see how google is indexing the title of the threads.

There is a place in google webmaster tools that has your ranking for certain keywords.

 

Thank you so much for that

 

Hi Meg!

I just posted an answer to you in another forum and my suggestion was to work on your SEO, but it looks like you are already doing that. I have spent the last month getting my forum ready to post and determining the keywords that will really help me target the niche I am looking to attract.

I use two tools: Keyword Country and Ad Intelligence. Keyword Country is a paid tool that is pretty good. It actually has so much functionality that I don't know what to do with all of it yet. It primarily shows you Google results, but you can also add Yahoo and MSN search results too. Ad Intelligence is an add-on to Microsoft Excel that runs off the data collected by Microsoft AdCenter. It is free to download, but you have to have an account with AdCenter. You can open one for $5 and just pause it so you don't run any ads. The information you get is pretty good and easy to interpret.

Hope that helps!
RR

 

ive recently came across the service called semrush, has anyone ever used it? it turned out to be the best resource for spying on competitors i have ever seen! amazing. The only problem is that they do not update that often, but you will get all possible information on the keywords that your competitors use - in AdWords or in organic.. Will be grateful if you show me the similar service with more frequent updates

 

I use semrush - great tool!