Keyword Basics Part 3: Choosing your best keywords Posted by Ken McGaffin on 01 May 2010

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.

In Keyword Basics 2, we searched and created a Project and List for chocolate. This shows the searches for each term. 'Searches' is the number of times the keyword appears in our database, which is created from over 640 million searches conducted over the last 365 days. Here's a screenshot of the Chocolate store Project we created:

Lets look at the List called 'chocolate' below:

In our example above, chocolate has a search volume of 6,994. High scoring keywords will be the most popular words in your marketplace. These are the words more people type into the search query box when they're searching for products.

But of course, there is a problem. Because the keywords are so popular, lots of websites 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 with a large budget will welcome this challenge and 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 those 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', such as product description, geographic location or specific target market. So while it might be difficult to rank well for chocolate, it will be less of a challenge to rank well for chocolate baskets, chocolate baskets Orlando (targeting a geographic area) or corporate chocolate baskets (targeting the business market).

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. Many SEOs adopt this niche keyword strategy to find more opportunity.

Let's look at how to find these niche keywords using Wordtracker's Keywords tool. When you have conducted a search, you can click on 'Get additional metrics' and these additional columns of data will appear:

Here's what each of these terms mean:

• Searches is the number of times the exact keyword appears in our database. Our database is created from over 635 million searches conducted over the last 365 days.
  
• In Anchor and Title (IAAT) counts the number of web pages for which the keyword appears in both the title tag and the anchor text of a backlink. IAAT is measuring the level of serious competition for each keyword. The higher the number, the more competition the keyword will face.
  
• KEI helps you rank your keywords by combining popularity (the number of searches) and competition in a single mathematical formula. The higher the number, the more effective the keyword is likely to be.
  
• KEI3 gives you an alternative view of the effectiveness of a keyword. In this formula, the influence of 'competition' has been increased so it may help identify particular niches.

So, in the example above, chocolate gift baskets has a high level of serious competition based on the IAAT score 1,390 and the low KEI of 2.80. But, the number two keyword chocolate coffee gift baskets has an IAAT of 16, and a KEI of 56.0 so the level of serious competition is low - 16 pages are optimized for that term, and the KEI is higher.

If you were to optimize for the phrase chocolate coffee gift basket on your website, you have much less competition and a better chance for a high page ranking and potential traffic.

Keep looking for opportunities. Keep searching and building a list of keywords or phrases with low IAAT numbers and high KEI numbers.

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 tolls, think about what they tell you about people, and develop your own ideas and methodologies.

Get a free 7-day trial

A subscription to Wordtracker's premium Keywords tool will help you to:

• Generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns.
  
• Optimize your website content by using the most popular keywords for your product and services.
  
• Research online markets, find niche opportunities and exploit them before your competitors.
  

You can get a free 7-day trial of Wordtracker’s Keywords tool

Here are links to the other four articles in this series:

• Keyword Basics Part 1: How search engines work
• Keyword Basics Part 2: Discovering 1000s of keywords organized into Projects and Lists
• Keyword Basics Part 4: Using keywords in website copywriting
• Keyword Basics Part 5: Building keyword rich inbound links

Please let us have your comments, feedback or questions with regard to Keyword Basics. We'd love to hear from you.

Updated: 1 May 2010