The key is in the word

People use keywords and phrases to search.

Whether this is in Google, Yahoo, MSN or within your own web site, the process is the same.

You type something in, the engine churns then spits out matches.

There are two important aspects to this. One is related to getting better search results as a users, the other is responding favourably to keyword searches as a provider. We will be covering the latter requirement here.

The importance of keywords

The importance of keywords is well know. Keywords are how people find information and resources on the internet. If you sell or provide something people are looking for on the internet, you need to make sure you can respond to their needs and fast.

It is important, both from the point of view of the business owner and the search engineer to understand the people who will be looking for your product or service.

There are many tools available that will tell us what keywords are popular, how much they cost for pay-per-click ads and we have the skils needed to make those keywrods work in your website. What we don't often have is an undestanding of what people will search for to try and find you or your competitors.

We get quite a lot of help from Google and other providers for this. May companies offer keyword generators, so if we are looking for widgets, it finds all the searches that had widgets in them, so it can come across some rather obscure but often intersting derivatives and alternatives.

Choosing the best keywords

If you sell widgets, the best keyword is widget. Or is it?

If there are many people selling widgets, you are linkely to be competing with millions of sites in a search. Getting a prominent position is difficult if not impossible without a great deal of time and investment.

You can fast-track with pay-per-click but for popular keywords, that becomes expensive.

So what can we do to get the best balance of prominence v effectiveness?

Well there is something called KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) which is probably the best indicator of a keyword's validity.

What is KEI and how can it help?

What the KEI does is compares the number of searches a keyword gets against the number of results it returns.

So, if widgets gets 1000 searches a month but returns 2,000,000 pages, the KEI would be 0.0005. This isn't very good because there are so many results fighting for so few searches.

If widgets gets 100,000 searches a month and returns 1,000,000 pages, we get a KEI of 0.1 which is much better.

But how does this help me? I'm still one of 1,000,000 pages that get returned.

Well here's the clever part.

Using keyword tools, we can see that there are many searches that people do with widgets in the phrase. For exmple, someone may search for 'widget retailer manchester'. In fact, 250 people a month may search for this. 

If this search returns 3000 pages, we would get a KEI of 0.83, This is a good value and does 2 things.

  • We get a good keyword or phrase toptimise for
  • We have a lot less competition in the results

We still have the term 'widgets' working just as hard but we have wrapped it in some other meaningful content that will help our rankings.

So all I need to do is work to the KEI for success?

The KEI is not a magic bullet but it can give some good indication of associated words and phrases that will work fairly quickly.

You still have to assess the competition and make judgements based on many factors.

Getting better rankings for your web site

If you want to talk to us about achieving better results from your web site, please contact us and we will be happy to discuss how we can help you.

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