this way...the dirextion blog
’)January 23rd, 2010
by: Matt Scalici
We are often asked by our clients whether choosing keywords for their websites should be as simple as researching their top competitors and matching their keyword lists. There’s certainly nothing private or protected about a keyword list. Anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML can view a website’s keyword tags simply by viewing the source code and looking for the tag. Copying a competitor’s keyword list is both simple and legal, but will it really help improve your site’s search engine listing?
Matching your competitor’s keyword list does not necessarily mean that we will be able to match their position on Google for those keywords. That’s because Google calculates its listings based on what it calls “relevance”. Google uses a complex, private formula to determine which websites are most relevant to a specific keyword or keyword phrase and keyword tags are just one of many, many components that determine a site’s relevance in this formula. In fact, many believe that keyword tags aren’t even the most important component in the formula.
What most experts agree is the most important component for making a site “relevant” to Google is the number of external links, meaning the number of times that other people on other websites throughout the internet mention your site. Obviously, your well-established competitor is going to have a tremendous advantage when it comes to having links and mentions on the web and this is likely the biggest reason they are number one in this category.
When building a client’s keyword list, we do a great deal of research to determine which keywords and phrases are searched for most often on Google. Part of that involves researching the competition but part of it involves looking at recent traffic numbers from Google. We believe that the keyword lists we build for our clients should contain the highest-traffic keywords of any in your category and tailoring your list to match your competitor’s exactly may in fact give you a less powerful keyword list. Your competitor’s high Google ranking has almost everything to do with their reputation and almost nothing to do with their keyword list, which can often be lightly researched and arbitrarily chosen.
Matt Scalici is the Search & Social Media Director at Dirextion, Inc. he has logged countless hours developing keyword lists and search programs for our clients.