The secrets of keyword selection

Keyword selection is the first step in any professional search engine optimization job. Ok, but what can be considered as "right keyword" for your website. If you want to succeed in search engine marketing forget about targeting single popular keywords. 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 targeted enough, and thereby will not result in as many sales as a highly targeted phrase.

What you need to find is your "keyword phrases" - combination of keywords, that
a) will bring you more targeted visitors
b) will make it much easier to get top ranking in the search engines

For example, if you are selling accounting software, then targeting word "software" would be almost useless. First of all there are couple of million pages that competing with you on this word and second, this is very broad term, and people typing word "software" in the search box may be looking for completely different product. You might want to look in keyword combinations, such as "accounting software", "software for accounts", "accounts application" etc.

You'd be surprised at how many excellent keywords and phrases you will overlook after you start getting second and third opinions from different people.

Many professional search engine optimization companies charge thousands of dollars for finding and analyzing keywords for your site. However, a new service called WordTracker promises to bring some sanity back to the keyword selection process. It is very easy to use and includes few simple steps:

1) You type in general keyword (for example our previous example "Software"

2) WordTraker gives you all keyword combination that are used by visitors in search engines, and estimated number of times that this keyword combination was searched. So it is 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.

3) By going through the list of key phrases you can choose keywords that can be suitable for you and add them to your basket.

4) When you completed keyword selection, go to the next step and analyze the competition for the keywords. WordTraker can show how many times this keyword is searched in a day in the major search engines and how many pages are competing with you on this keyword. It also gives you "KEI" of the keyword, which in simple words is index of how good this keyword is. By comparing it's popularity and competitiveness it can recommend you if this could be good keyword to optimize for.

WordTracker charges a fee based on how long you wish to use the service. Pricing starts around $6.79 for 1 day subscription. 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.