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When you redesign a website, whether utilizing WordPress or any other technology or CMS, there are several things to keep in mind. I'll first address WordPress. I am a WordPress developer (as well as an expert on various other CMS technologies), and as such WordPress can be very good for any website large and small. However there are many things to consider. First, when you select WordPress you must determine whether you choose to use a template and make modifications either visually or to the code or if you will select a developer to create a custom WordPress theme. Selecting a Template can be effective but you MUST know the quality. There are so many people and companies out there that provide WordPress templates whether a fixed price for the template or a club membership, but how do you know its any good? I have found over time to trust only a few as many sites out there provide very poor quality templates. You might be asking how can I define quality in a template and what about these templates, they look good. The visual aspect to your template is of course important, however the quality, especially when it comes to SEO is based on the actual code, html, css, etc. Many developers don't provide quality code, so SEO can and will be affected - ie improper use of header tags, etc. Over time here are several WordPress vendors that I have found provide great quality: ThemeForest this site is by far the best. Their requirements for becoming an author are extreme and they only accept the best. I have been working on selling themes here as well and they look at EVERYTHING to ensure quality. WooThemes this site provides excellent themes and they feature some of the best developers on the web! StudioPress also offers great themes and high quality. Now on to plugins. If you have your theme and it provides the quality you desire, utilizing various plugins will ensure that you achieve the desired SEO results you are looking for. As mentioned by Sha, Yoast SEO is a very good plugin which is found here http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ however I also use All in One SEO and have found it very good for SEO and received great results. As mentioned you want to make sure that your content is optimized and everything ported over so keeping current links will definitely help. You could also have Google re-index your website. I also suggest utilizing a Sitemap.xml plugin to ensure that it is constantly up to date: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ If you find that a template is not helping you or meeting your requirements, I would recommend a custom WordPress theme. This will ensure that the website is developed properly for SEO and ensures all plugins will work properly. There are many other aspects that can play a part in a WordPress built website, but these are the most significant. If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer your questions! Thanks, Mark

I agree with your point; however, scanning a competitors keywords tag is, as you said, just a starting point (assuming they didn't dump their entire link building campaign worth of keywords/phrases into the tag). For example, a keywords tag for a real estate site homepage might be: content="real estate, homes for sale, houses for sale", or something along those lines.  Now, those keywords might be useful for the search engines that still respect the keywords tag, but they're not any help to competition as you probably could have guess, just by looking at the site, that those were keywords they are probably trying to optimize for, anyways. Just remember, Google's not the only search engine out there. It'd be foolish to give away any trade secrets within those tags, anyways, so there's not much to worry about in my opinion.