The Importance of Keywords on SEO

April 6, 2008 – 1:49 pm

keyword analysisKeywords are like puzzle pieces to the search engines, every word used on a webpage contributes to the big picture of what a site is all about. Used in the appropriate densities, it is these keywords that will ultimately determine how many people you can reach through the search engines.

Users type in keywords in the Search field to find what they are looking for. The search engine then reaches into its database to find the most relevant result. Relevant results are driven by different factors, mainly by keywords, but also by traffic and the number of links pointing in from external websites.

Getting the Right Keywords is Everything
So how do you know which keywords get searched for the most? There are literally hundreds of Keyword Analyzers on the Web. Only one has passed the test of time and to-date recognized as the authority on keyword searches: WordTracker. At the time of this writing, they are number one, not just because they have the largest following, but because their database spans 120 days, not just a single month like some others.

Another reason that recommend WordTracker is because of the results you generate from running queries on their database. The results return a Keyword Effective Index (KEI) that not only calculates the number of estimated searches, but also includes competitior numbers in the calculation. In other words, Number of Searches / Number of Competing Websites = KEI.

Overture, now Yahoo! Search Marketing, also has a Keyword Selector Tool (KWST) that gets a lot of hype. However, this tool has been noted to be skewed by developers. I’ve seen a lot of spam in the results myself in the past, so I don’t argue that this tool has some bugs. Another drawback of the KWST is that it consolidates plurals and has a man-made database of keywords and keyword phrases; most of which are in no particular sequence. Non-organic results aren’t as helpful to your keyword analysis.

For example, WordTracker may tell you that you can expect 4,303 daily searches for banana and 3,220 daily searches for bananas. Overture, on the other hand only has one term: banana, which it claims gets 2,384.5 daily searches (what’s a .5?). KWST is a great tool for determining which keywords get the most searches, but you can acquire a more accurate prediction of potential searchers using WordTracker.

However, this guide promises to deliver a free method to SEO, so I’m going to share another highly effective tool that shows both WordTracker and Overture results. Unfortunately, the WordTracker results won’t display KEI, but at least you can see the number of daily searches it estimates you can expect for your keyword. The site is DigitalPoint.com and here is a direct link to their free keyword analyzer:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Hint to Using Keyword Analyzers: Keyword analyzers return a list of suggestions based on the words used in your search. Keep your searches ambiguous to uncover t best selection of terms to use. For example, if you sell banana boat covers, do a sear( for banana. You may find that there are 10 times as many people searching for banan boat umbrellas, which you wouldn’t have know if you were search for specific phrases

Okay, now we have a tool to analyze our keywords, but we still don’t know what keywords our competitors are targeting. We will explain about keyword competition on next post in this blog.

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