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Good keywords may aid our focus, but do the search engines care?

There was a time when keyword selection was thought to be one of the most important factors in how search engines ranked your site. Figuring out the "right" keywords, and using them in such a way that your site gets to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) spawned a specialty, search engine optimization (SEO).

(Note: In popular usage, the term "keywords" includes "key phrases," i.e., a keyword can be more than one word. An example is "make money online.") 

The concept of SEO is that a page can be optimized, that is, designed in a particular way that ranks it highly in the SERPs, for a particular set of keywords. Think of how high it needs to rank to get people's attention. At ten results per page, do you ever go past about page three looking for a search result? How often do you only look at the first page? 

So our goal should then be top-ten placement, with top-thirty representing the limit of acceptable results. Let us say our keywords are "business opportunities." Wait ... OK. I just tried Google and that exact phrase (in quotes) yielded about 10.8 million results! So we could be in the top 0.00001% and still not make the top-ten.

So maybe that was a bad choice of keywords. Let me try "work at home business opportunities." Hmm, only 126,000 results. But will enough of my target audience use that exact set of five words? You see the trade-off. Let's take a look at what we have to get right to win at this game:

1. Pick the "right" keywords, those that our prospective customers will use to find sources of the product we offer. (Then, we need to demonstrate some competitive advantage over other sources of our product, but that's a whole different subject).
   

2. Place the keywords in the site in the proper way. For example,
   keywords in titles, headers, and links, and nearer the top and bottom of the page "count" more heavily than in "middling" body text.
   

3. Use the keywords the "right" number of times. The number of times a keyword appears divided by the number of words on the page is referred to as " keyword density" and different experts suggest different target values for the major search engines.

The current importance of keywords in SEO is a matter of debate. We will still take a look at the "tools of the trade" for two reasons. One, they might be important, or may come back into favor. Two, the selection of keywords that describe the "theme" of your site can be very helpful in shaping the theme, focusing on your target market, and designing how the pages of your site should relate.

We will look primarily at Google's treatment of keywords. Google seems to be the " gold standard" of search engines, as you have probably noticed by now. Yahoo! and MSN Search may be considered to round out the major search engines category.

Here are some of the keywords we tried for this site: business opportunity, work from home, make money on the internet, work at home, internet marketing, business plans, make money online, home business ideas, work at home jobs, work at home opportunities, internet in business, entrepreneur.

Notice that these are rather broad, and so the competition for them is probably intense. I could narrow down to some niche such as "business plans for restaurants," or, "work at home baby boomers."

Let's try "work from home" on Wordtracker, a very popular tool that we recommend. They also publish an excellent Keyword Research Guide, available free-of-charge.

Wordtracker suggests 14 related keywords in the free trial (264 in the paid version). Here is how they explain it

"Why do I need related keywords?

Not everybody searches for '"work from home"'.

You need to take advantage of other keywords that mean the same thing.

A good example is the term 'website promotion'. If you were to simply target this keyword, you would miss out on all the traffic you could generate by targeting 'internet marketing', 'web marketing' or 'internet advertising'. They're all different ways of looking at the same thing.

Treat related keywords as suggestions - a brainstorming tool."

Next, Wordtracker asks which of these selections go in the keyword "basket." This is where we select from the keyword list those words for which we want more information. What else might we want to know? Let's see what Wordtracker provides.

Selecting "work at home" this time, Wordtracker produces another table:

Count - This shows the number of times a particular keyword has appeared in our database. E.g. Our database currently holds 303,766,345 words. A count of 6123 tells us that this particular word has appeared 6123 times out of 303,766,345.

So we have picked the keywords in this theme that are the most popular. To complete the picture, we need to know about the intensity of the competition, that is, how many other companies are seeking customers who use these phrases.

The following table from Wordtracker introduces a new variable, KEI:

KEYWORD EFFECTIVENESS INDEX (KEI)

Sumantra Roy (http://www.1stSearchRanking.com) a respected Search Engine Positioning specialist, has kindly allowed us to incorporate his KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) into Wordtracker.

The KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.
 

 

No.	Keyword	KEI Analysis	Count	Competing
1	"work at home careers"	216.087	1047	5073
2	"make money work at home"	208.800	1045	5230
3	"work at home"	34.365	6123	1090972
4	"work at home business"	20.344	1676	138074

This is where you spot your niches ... The figure you want to take note of is the 'KEI Analysis'. The higher this figure, the more popular your keyword is and the less competition it has. This generally means that you will find it easier to reach the top of this keyword.

Now you need to make sense of the KEI figure. Generally, a poor keyword to target will have a KEI of between 0 - 10. It's not wise to target keywords with this KEI as there is too much competition and you will probably end up on page 34 and no-one will notice you!

Good keywords to target have a KEI of between 10 - 100. These are good value bets and you have a good to medium chance of reaching the top. Between 100-400 are your best bets and anything above 400+ is a gift!

Note how well "work at home careers" and "make money work at home" do. Both have KEIs greater than 200.

For the numbers people among you, KEI is the square of the popularity of a keyword (p) multiplied by 1000 and divided by the number of sites (s) which appear in AltaVista for that keyword.

KEI (s ≠ 0) = p^2 * 1000 / s

With that settled, let's take a break. My sense is that you understand the concepts, but could use a little more practice before being completely comfortable with keywords. So, our next session will be a keyword "lab."

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