Sumantra Roy
In this article, we focus on the correct way of finding out the
keywords for which you should optimize your site. This article
will give you the formula for the Keyword Effectiveness Index
(KEI) - a mathematical formula which I have developed to help you
determine which keywords you should be optimizing your site for.
Step 1: Open your text editor or word processor and write down
all the words and phrases that you might have searched for if you
were looking for a company which offers products and services
similar to yours. For example, suppose your company organizes
packaged tours to Australia. Here's a list of phrases that I
might have searched for if I were planning to make a trip to
Australia:
tourism in Australia
travel to Australia
travelling in Australia
travel agencies in Australia
travelling agencies in Australia
Australian travel agencies
Of course, the keywords that came to your mind may have been
different. But that's not important - the important thing is to
get an initial list of keywords.
You may be wondering why I have not used single word keywords.
Here's why:
Firstly, single word keywords tend to be hyper-competitive. A
search for "tourism" or travelling in any search engine will
probably generate hundreds of thousands of pages. While it is
possible that you may get your page in the top 10 for such a
single word keyword, it is quite unlikely.
Secondly, because of the sheer number of pages that single word
searches can throw up, most search engine users have realized
that they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases
rather than individual words. Statistical research has shown that
most people are now searching for 2 or 3 word phrases rather than
for single words.
Thirdly, single word keywords won't get you targeted traffic.
When people search for "tourism", they are not necessarily
looking for tourist destinations in Australia - they may be
interested in any other country of the world. Even if you got
your site into the top 10 for tourism, you gain nothing from such
visitors. However, when someone searches for "tourism in
Australia", he/she is your potential customer, and hence, it
makes sense for you to try and get a top ranking for your site
for that keyword.
Hence, whenever you are trying to generate keywords, try to be
location specific. Try to think of keywords which apply to the
geographic area that your product or service is designed to
serve.
Step 2: Find out what your competitors are doing.
A great way to obtain a list of the keywords your competitors are
trying to optimize their sites for is to visit
http://www.jimtools.com/keywords/index.html
Type in your first keyword (i.e. tourism in Australia) in the
"Enter a primary keyword or keyword phrase:" text box. Enter all
the remaining keywords in your list in the "Optional secondary
keywords or phrases:" text box. Separate these keywords by
spaces. For the "How many suggestions do you want?" question,
choose "A Lot". Click on the Generate Suggestions button. This
site will then go to the search engines, search for your
keywords, and will then display the keywords present in the meta
keywords tag of the top ranking pages. While all the keywords
that it displays will not be applicable for your site, it will
throw up quite a few good keywords for you to consider.
Suppose that among the keywords that the JimTools page has
displayed, the following keywords are applicable for your site
(and have not already been added to your original list):
tourism Down Under
travelling Down Under
travelling to Australia
Australian tourism
(This is just a hypothetical list. The actual keywords that it
lists will be different and will obviously change with time). Add
these keywords to your original list. However, don't add a
keyword to your list unless it is really relevant to your site.
For example, your competitors may have the names of their
companies in their meta keywords tag. Obviously, you should not
include it in your keyword list. Similarly, if your competitors
sell products which you don't, they may have it in their meta
tags, but you should not include those keywords in your list.
As an interesting side note, note how your competitors have used
the word Down Under as an alternative to Australia. You too
should keep a look out for that and try to use multiple forms of
a word whenever you can and whenever they are applicable for your
web site.
Another point to note here is that if you have read other
articles on finding the correct keywords for your site, you may
have been advised to include common typos in your keyword list.
This, however, has both advantages and disadvantages. The
benefit, of course, is that if you optimize your site for a
common typo and manage to obtain a higher ranking for that typo,
a person who has made that typo while searching will be able to
find you, thus increasing the traffic to your web site.
However, your objective is not just to get a higher search engine
ranking, but to get a higher ranking and translate that higher
ranking into higher sales. Keep in mind that the pages in your
site are going to be visited not only by search engines but also
by humans. If you create a page in your site which is optimized
for a particular typo, that page is going to be seen by the
visitors to your site who have inadvertently made that typo while
typing in the keyword in the search engine.
Imagine the kind of first impression you will be making on such
visitors if they spot a typo in your web site. Even though the
visitor himself has made that typo, when he forms the first
impression of your site, the last thing he is going to consider
is that he himself made the same mistake. If, for example, you
had optimized one of your pages for the keyword: "turism in
Australia", (assuming that turism is a common typo) the first
thing that a potential customer of yours may think is: "Well,
this company is supposed to be involved in tourism, but doesn't
even know the spelling of tourism. Who knows how many other such
goof-ups it will make if I ask it to organize a trip for me to
Australia? Better look somewhere else." And your potential
customer has gone for ever. Hence, in my opinion, you should not
optimize your site for any typos.
Coming back to the main topic of this article, once you have
searched for the original keywords in your list and added the
relevant keywords which the JimTools page has displayed to your
list, you should have a fairly large list of possible keywords.
Once you have those keywords, we can move on to the fun part -
finding out which of these keywords are the most popular!
Step 3: Find out which keywords are the most popular
Go to the following web site:
http://selfpromotion.com/susser.t?GUEST=1stSearchRanking
Type in your email address in the box provided, and then type in
the list of keywords that you have developed in Steps 1 and 2 in
the "Suss these words" box. To speed things up, you can use your
operating system's Copy and Paste feature. Simply copy all the
keywords from your text editor or word processor and paste them
into the "Suss these words" box.
Then, click on the Suss! button. The Keyword Susser tool will
soon email you a list of the keywords which resemble the keywords
that you had typed in, along with the number of times people have
searched for those keywords in the GoTo search engine during the
last month. The keywords will be arranged in descending order of
popularity.
Now, open any spreadsheet program. I assume you are using
Microsoft Excel. If you are using some other spreadsheet program,
just change the spreadsheet related procedures outlined here to
fit your program.
Create 4 columns - one for the keyword, one for the number of
times the keyword has been used by users in GoTo, one for the
number of sites that appear in AltaVista for that keyword and the
last for something I call the Keyword Effectiveness Index (don't
worry - I'll explain what KEI means later on). In order to ensure
that you can follow what I am saying, I recommend that you add
the following column headers to the first four columns of the
first row of your spreadsheet:
Keyword
Popularity
No. of Competitors
KEI
In case you don't want to take the trouble of creating your own
spreadsheet, download the keywords.zip file from
http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/download.htm.
The file contains
a sample spreadsheet in Excel 97 format.
Then in the table that you have created in your spreadsheet, type
in each of the keywords that the Keyword Susser has thrown up in
the first column and the number of times those keywords have been
used in the second column. In order to ensure that you can follow
me, make sure that you type the first keyword in the second row
of your spreadsheet. Instead of typing, you can speed things up
by using the Copy and Paste feature, i.e. by copying the keyword
from the email and pasting it in your spreadsheet program. Of
course, you should only bother adding a keyword to your
spreadsheet if it is applicable for your site.
Step 4: Find out how competitive your keywords are
Go to AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com). Search for the first
keyword that is present in your spreadsheet. AltaVista will
return the number of sites which are relevant to that keyword.
Add this number to the third column of the spreadsheet in the
same row in which the keyword is present. Repeat this process for
each of the keywords present in your spreadsheet.
Once you have done that, your first column will contain the
keywords, your second column will contain the number of times
people have been searching for those keywords and your third
column will contain the number of sites you are competing against
to get a high ranking for those keywords.
Now it's time to calculate the KEI!
Step 5: The Keyword Effectiveness Index
The Keyword Effectiveness Index is the square of the number of
people who have searched for a keyword in Goto in the last month
divided by the number of sites which appear in AltaVista for that
keyword. It is designed to measure which keywords are worth
optimizing your site for. Higher the KEI, better the keyword. How
the formula for the KEI is arrived at is beyond the scope of this
article. If you want to know, send a blank email to
kei@autobots.net.
If you had used the spreadsheet file that I created for you (see
Step 3), you won't need to enter the formula for calculating KEI
yourself. The KEI would be automatically calculated for you the
moment you enter the values in columns 2 and 3. You can go
straight to Step 6.
In case you didn't download the file, here's how you can
calculate the KEI.
I am assuming that you have created the spreadsheet columns in
the way I recommended in Step 3 and that you are using Microsoft
Excel. If you using some other spreadsheet program, you will need
to adjust the formula to the requirements of your spreadsheet
program. Click on cell D2. Type in the following exactly as it is
shown:
=IF(C2<>0,B2^2/C2,0)
Then click on the Copy button to copy the formula, select all the
cells in column 4 which have keywords associated with them and
press the Paste button to paste the formula. The KEI for each
keyword will be displayed.
Step 6: Finding the most effective keywords
Use your spreadsheet program's Sort feature to sort the rows in
descending order of the KEI. In Excel 97, you would click on the
Data menu, click on the Sort menu item, choose KEI from the
drop-down combo box named "Sort by", click on the "Descending"
option next to it, and then click on OK.
And guess what - that's it! You now know the keywords you should
optimize your site for. You can now start optimizing your site
one by one for each keyword, starting with the keyword with the
highest KEI. Exactly how many of the keywords you choose to
optimize your site for largely depends on the amount of time that
you can spare from your normal business activities. But whatever
the number of keywords that you target, it obviously makes sense
to go for the most effective keywords first.
Tying up the loose ends:
The above method of using GoTo.com's Search Suggestion feature to
measure the popularity of keywords is based on the assumption
that people who use GoTo.com as their search engine are more or
less representative of all the users of the Internet. In my
opinion, that is a pretty safe assumption. While the actual
number of people who searched for a particular keyword in any of
the other search engines may be different from GoTo, I see no
reason to believe that the relative popularity of the keywords
would be different. If 1000 people searched for a particular
keyword and 50 people searched for another keyword in GoTo (i.e.
a ratio of 20:1), then it is quite probable that the ratio for
another search engine is also close to 20:1. The actual numbers
for a more popular search engine than GoTo may be 3000 and 150,
but the ratio, in my opinion, will be pretty similar.
One way to verify whether the ratios are actually similar is to
use MSN's Keyword bidding service at
http://keywords.bcentral.com/.
Scroll down the page and in the
text box below "How much does it cost for Keyword listing on MSN
Search?", type in the keyword that you want to check, and then
click on the Check Price button. The site will soon display a
page containing last month's impressions of that keyword.
Although MSN does not give you the exact number of times people
have searched for a particular keyword (it only tells you whether
the number falls within a certain range), it can give you a rough
idea of the relative popularity of each keyword. I have conducted
numerous queries using both GoTo and MSN's tools and have seen
nothing to indicate that the relative popularity of keywords in
the two search engines is different.
In addition to this, remember that GoTo lists the number of
people who have searched for a particular keyword in the previous
month. Hence, you might consider repeating Step 3 in the next
month in order to ensure that the figures for the previous month
are no aberration.
This article may be re-published as long as the following
resource box is included at the end of the article:
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Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is a search
engine positioning
specialist. For free articles on search engine placement,
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email to 1stSearchRanking-subscribe@listbot.com or by
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