Become a Virtual Spy

View the HTML source of key pages (control-U in Firefox). Sometimes Webmasters leave redacted text in the source, just commented out. I once stumbled upon key pricing information from a competitor this way. In the source, check out its meta “keyword” tags to see what search terms the company deems important. Browse the site’s robots.txt file to see what content your rival would prefer to keep off of the engines. For example, check out the current White House administration’s lengthy exclude file at www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt.