Keyword Basics Part 3: Choosing your best keywords by Ken McGaffin, 22 February 2007

You know how sometimes you make a list of say, three things and then by the time you get to the end of the list, you remember that there’s something you really must include and your list of three becomes a list of four? This is Part 3 of Ken McGaffin's Keyword Basics series

Well, that's happened to me with this series of three articles – I need to squeeze in another. So this article will be about choosing your best keywords from the many that can be generated using Wordtracker. The next article in this series will look at how to use your best keywords to create high ranking pages.

So how do you choose the best keywords, the ones you should concentrate on first?

In part 2, The Keyword Matrix, we developed two spreadsheets for chocolate and related terms, one of 85 search terms using the free trial and one of over 5000 terms using the full version (you can download both spreadsheets from the previous article).

The spreadsheets gave a prediction of the daily searches for each term:

The 'predict' figure is the first metric you should look at. High scoring keywords will be the most popular words in your marketplace - the words people use when they're searching for your products - so 'gifts' for a luxury chocolate site, 'cheap flights' for a travel site.

But of course there is a problem. Because the keywords are so popular, lots of sites will use them. You will face a lot of competition and much of that competition will be good at search engine optimization.

An experienced SEO will welcome this challenge and will apply skill and hard work over a number of months to compete effectively. But a novice SEO will find it virtually impossible to compete for these highly popular keywords. What then should the novice do?

Strategies for a novice SEO

I think there are three strategies you should follow:

1. Include the most popular keywords in your website copy, even though you may not rank well for them. Your customers will expect to see these keywords, and search engines will take note of them. By including them, you lay a foundation for the long term - slowly but surely as you add more content, your rankings will rise.
2. Use the most popular keywords along with 'qualifiers', either geographic or sector specific. So while it might be difficult to rank well for 'chocolate gifts', it is not such a challenge to rank well for 'chocolate gifts Buffalo' targeting a geographic area or 'corporate chocolate gifts' targeting the business sector.
3. Look for niche keywords or markets that others haven't yet found. Such keywords have the magic combination of being relatively popular searches, but having little competition. Wordtracker provides a measurement for this - KEI or keyword effectiveness index. Many SEOs adopt this niche keyword strategy: John Alexander and Robin Nobles explain the approach in detail in this excellent article - An Ingenious Way to Use Wordtracker.

Wordtracker provides you with a number of metrics to help in these strategies. You can see them here in the full version (similar metrics are available with the trial):

Here's what each of these terms mean:

• Searches is the number of times the exact keyword appears in our sample of people's searches.
• Predict is the number of times over a 24-hour period that the exact keyword will be searched for over all engines.
• Google is the number of results that Google will return for the exact search term in quotation marks (you can also choose other search engines).
• Google KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is a calculation of the "effectiveness" of each keyword, taking into account the predicted searches and the number of competing pages.

As with all things in search engine optimization you have to use a mixture of solid data AND human intelligence. Keyword research is not a simple one-off task. You will achieve much more if you investigate the tools, think about what they tell you about people, and develop your own ideas and methodologies.

A final tip to expand your keyword list

Today, if I did a search for 'chocolate gifts' on Wordtracker, I'd get a predict figure of 192. But that score is for the exact keyword phrase on its own - it does not count people's searches that include 'chocolate gifts' along with other words.

To find these additional keywords do this search in the full version of Wordtracker: Keyword Researcher

The results will show a prediction of 386 for phrases that contain 'chocolate gifts' - almost twice as many as for 'chocolate gifts' alone.

Please keep those comments coming. The next article in this series will look at how to use your best keywords to create high ranking pages.

You'll find links to the other three articles in this series below:

• Keyword Basics Part 1: How Search Engines Work
• Keyword Basics Part 2: Discovering The Keyword Matrix
• Keyword Basics Part 4: Using Keywords In Website Copywriting