Keyword Selection - Finally an Easier Way to Do It!

If you've read past newsletters, you probably know that the most important first step to marketing your Web site to the search engines is proper keyword selection. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if you target the wrong keywords, all your efforts will be in vain!

For example, if you optimize your Web pages for keywords that you think are important, but few, if anybody on the Web searches for those keywords, then you can have all the number one rankings you want and still gain no new traffic. Sometimes people use WebPosition Gold and achieve many top rankings but then they complain that they didn't receive any traffic from their efforts. At first they tend to blame the software. However, in almost all cases, the explanation is simple. They targeted the WRONG keywords!

Another danger of choosing keywords is selecting keywords that are TOO popular. Selecting keywords that are overly broad and popular poses two problems. First, if the keyword is too popular, it will require more work than it's worth to achieve a top ten ranking. Second, and most importantly, if the phrase is too broad, then the traffic you receive will not be appropriate to your site, and thereby will not result in as many SALES as a highly targeted phrase.

For example, we sell software. However, we don't attempt to optimize our site for just the keyword software for both the reasons mentioned above.On Google alone there are over 117 million matches for the keyword "software." However, for something more specific like search engine ranking software, there are only 305,000 matches. Still a large number, but not impossible to achieve. One of our WebPosition resellers has the number one slot on that phrase demonstrating that someone with the right tools can achieve top rankings if they put their mind to it.

The question is, what is the best way to choose the right keywords? Finding the BEST keywords can help you achieve greater amounts of traffic with less effort on your part. More traffic for less time spent, a desirable goal right? In the past, I've given many tips on how to do this and pointed people to the free keyword service at www.Yahoo! Search Marketing.com. The problem with www.Yahoo! Search Marketing.com is that their servers are not terribly reliable (often slow or unresponsive), and the amount of flexibility in finding optimal keywords is rather limited. For example, they give counts of how many times a keyword was searched, but they give no indication at how competitive those keywords are in relation to their popularity.

I'm happy to report that I have discovered a MUCH better way for discovering the best keywords available, and how to accomplish it in a shorter amount of time. There's a new service with both free and paid options called WordTracker. ( WordTracker ) To my knowledge it has no equal in the industry.

I've tested several keyword products and services over the years and until recently found none that worked better than Yahoo! Search Marketing.com's less than stellar keyword service. If you've tried Yahoo! Search Marketing.com, you know that you can enter a keyword like "travel" and it will return all the popular variations of travel like "air travel," "travel reservations," etc. along with how many times the keyword was searched during the previous month.

Unfortunately, Yahoo! Search Marketing's keyword service has several flaws. It condenses terms so that "bank" and "banks" are both lumped under the singular form of the word. Some search engines differentiate between singular and plural keywords so it helps to know how much traffic can be expected from each. Yahoo! Search Marketing.com can't help you here, but WordTracker let's you do both a compressed search like Yahoo! Search Marketing.com, as well as a simple search that lists singular and plural terms separately.

The advantages of WordTracker are many:

1. WordTracker will estimate the amount of "projected" traffic you can expect from each search engine if you achieve an optimal ranking for that keyword. They do this by taking the known popularity of the search in relation to other statistics they have acquired. Admittedly, there is no way to predict exactly how much traffic you will receive for a ranking since that will vary on many things such as how good your summary description is, how targeted the keyword is to your site, and the exact ranking you achieve. I think they could still improve on the accuracy of their "projected" number of hits, but what they have is useful already.

2. As with Yahoo! Search Marketing.com, WordTracker will give you a count of how many times a keyword was searched over a period of time. One difference is that WordTracker's database is always current with old data being bumped out in favor of new data each day. They pull their results from multiple metacrawlers on the Web.

Some search terms surge and fall in popularity. Therefore, seeing changes in trends more quickly will give you a competitive edge not only with the search engines, but with your marketing plans in general. In addition, they have a cool feature that lets you see the top 1000 most popular keywords for both the last 36 hours or the last 54 days. You can check either of these at any time if you're an entrepreneur looking for up and coming new trends on the Web.

3. WordTracker has features for the professional Web consultant by allowing you to setup multiple "project" files. You can create projects for different Web sites or clients where your various keyword lists that you accumulate are saved and organized for you. There's even a handy export option that lets you send keywords to a list that can be pasted quickly into WebPosition's Reporter, or you can have it e-mail the list to a friend or client.

4. One of the best things about WordTracker is its ability to "brainstorm" for you. Many consultants get paid big bucks to evaluate a business and come up with a long list of highly targeted keywords and phrases. You'd be surprised at how many excellent keywords and phrases you (or your consultant) will overlook after you start getting second and third opinions from different people. WordTracker solves this problem by taking a single keyword or phrase from you, doing a search for Web sites matching that keyword, and then extracting keywords from their meta tags.

WordTracker then assembles a list of dozens of keywords, many from your competitors or related sites that you may never have thought of. It takes what would take a person hours to do by hand and does it within seconds.

You can then go down the list and check only the words you deem are appropriate to your site. Once you do that, you may have WordTracker go out and do a "competitive analysis" and rank the keywords based on how often they are searched AND how competitive they are. It estimates the competitiveness of the term by how many times it appears on the Web for a search on a major search engine.

When doing a competitive analysis, keywords that are searched often, yet appear on the Web fewer times are ranked the highest. In this way, you can easily locate and target highly popular keywords for which relatively few Web sites are competing. If you optimize for these keywords, you then gain MORE traffic for LESS work. Anything that allows me to get better results with less effort, I'm all for! (Yes, I admit it, I prefer to be lazy when it comes right down to it).

If you've tried WordTracker in the past and walked away, I'd encourage you to give it another try. I originally evaluated them early last year and decided they needed to polish their service more, expand their database, and fix some technical issues before they were ready for "prime-time." I'm happy to report that they have been very responsive to my suggestions and criticisms. I believe they care about their customers since they send a follow up e-mail to everyone who tries the service asking them how they could improve the service. It's obvious they've been listening since they now have dozens of different search options to choose from in a fairly slick online interface.

One criticism I had was that the size of their database appears to be much smaller than Yahoo! Search Marketing.com's. They admit this is true although they are continuing to expand it from the 30 million records to potentially 100 million down the road while keeping it more current than any other service. Many more obscure terms return only a couple of "hits" in their database.

However, they make a good point that if it's only searched a couple times out of 30 million searches, the traffic you'd receive from even a number one ranking on that type of keyword across all the major engines would not be worth the effort to optimize for anyway. I tend to agree that there is a law of diminishing returns. If a keyword is not searched a reasonable number of times, you should not waste your time with it.

Despite this, WordTracker covers their bases. If you want a second or third opinion, they have an option to search the Yahoo! Search Marketing.com database as well as the 7Search database right from their interface.

I ultimately have relatively few gripes with WordTracker. If I were to wish for one improvement, I'd say their help files could be a little better. They actually have a lot of online help if you take the time to look for it. They are busy adding more hyperlinks and pop up windows to explain all the terminology no matter where you are in the program. If you were to get confused, check out their help or FAQ, and if you still have questions, just e-mail them. Their support from my experience appears to be pretty responsive.

WordTracker offers both free and paid options. The paid options are based on how long you wish to use the service. Pricing starts around $22.22 for a one week subscription. One day subscription costs $6.67. However, this is plenty of time to build your "optimal" list of keywords to target since they make it so easy to do. They also have longer term options if you're optimizing a lot of sites over the course of the year, or wish to stay current on what the best keywords are at any given time. If you're serious about optimizing your Web site, the one year subscription may be well worth the investment. If it helps, I've seen no better service regardless of the price. The help it provides in brainstorming keywords is worth the price in itself.

You can test the waters with their free trial that takes you through a wizard style interface to select and find keywords. The trial is limited in how many keywords it will return at one time. However, it will let you run through the trial as many times as you like making it a very useful service in itself.

Be aware that the free trial is somewhat deceptive in a way since it shows you only a fraction of the number of cool search options that you receive in the full version. For example, the full version has many options such as simple search, exact search, compressed search, comprehensive search, keyword universe, full search, misspellings search, keyword projects, top 1000 reports, and stuff you probably never even thought of. They are apparently confident you'll be impressed since they offer an unconditional money-back guarantee if you're not fully satisfied with the paid service.

Their free trial is available at:

WordTracker

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold. FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings. A free trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web site.

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