What you want to do is compiling keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide, to create the most powerful Keyword collection for your need.

Knowing what exact search phrases customers use to find your products or services enables you to maximize the available search engine traffic.

The reason for this is quite simple. If your web page does not contain the exact search keywords a customer is using, your page will not be found in the search engine results. Basically this means fewer potential customers visiting your web pages.

Secondly, identifying all the relevant keywords to use in PPC campaigns, such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, provides better coverage and increases ROI. You can target keywords individually setting CPC rates to suit each term, which improves ROI, as you do not need to rely on broad match options which are well known to generate lower conversions.

Given the fact that over 80% of all online transactions begin with a keyword search on one of the major search engines available on the internet. This really tells the importance for your web site to have the right keywords that people use for search so they will be able to find specifically your web site with your products or services. To compete on the internet you need to target all the relevant keywords.

Several software available today can tell you the search phrases people use to find products and services, as well as the search terms that can drive traffic to your competitors.

You can take advantage of this information to either optimize the content of your web pages and your meta tags and you can maximize your pay per click campaigns and finally you will be able to take traffic away from your competitors.

All these three reasons should be enough to understand the importance of finding the keywords that are most suitable for you and your website and to be included in your content and meta tags.

Keyword Research is one of the first and most important tasks you will undertake in the process of finding the right keywords. If you are selling specific products or services, use this word and put it into a keyword research program (like f.inst Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, AOL Hot Searches , Ask IQ, Dogpile SearchSpy, Google Trends, Google Zeitgeist, Lycos 50, MSN Search Insider, Yahoo Buzz Index).

When a typical user does a search, the pages that are displayed within the top 10 results usually contain the EXACT phrase that is being searched for somewhere in the page content. This means that if you have the phrase “service and/or product” somewhere in your page, but not “Cheap service/product” or “Free product/service” you would be missing out on thousands of potential customers that use these phrases to look for your web hosting services.

The Industry Keywords research tools will track the most popular search terms that are driving actual traffic to sites in various industries. This data enables you to compare the keywords you are currently receiving traffic for, with that of your competitors in the same industry.

For Example:

The top searches in the Recreation / Motorcycles category include: scooter chopper , bmw r80, Kawasaki, harley davidson , 50cc scooter mopeds and many more. It is therefore imperative that you find out from your industry standpoint of view, what keywords are the most popular within your branch. This will give you the edge above others in the same industry. F.inst travel or *** industry, it is important to differentiate already on the keyword level.

Spelling Mistake Research . Many people have difficulty spelling, make typing mistakes when entering keywords or simply write words in a different way, for example, the word “color” in the US is written as “Colour” in other parts of the world. How many other words do you think are spelled differently? You can take advantage of this by targeting commonly misspelled keywords. These keywords are often far less competitive than the correctly spelled keyword.

Example: If we go to a travel site, lets try and find the different ways people spell the word accommodation. Tools like Wordtracker or Word Discovery have this function to check various spelling of this word. We find out that there are at least 10 various ways this word is spelled amongst users on the internet. Fantastic, this gives us another edge we could use in the marketing of our web site. If you target the common keyword misspellings in your PPC campaigns and even in organic SEO, you can get a real edge over your competition.

Seasonal Search Trends. The problem with most keyword research tools, such as Overture, Word Discovery and WordTracker, etc., is that they rely on the previous 1 or 2 month’s of search data. This makes it very difficult to predict what users will be searching for next week or next month.

For this reason, you need to do a search history that spans a full 12 month period to encompass the seasonal changes of words, actually you will need to run a keyword check on a regular basis as events can make people change keyword usage. This was easily seen in 2007, as events (celebrities in news, disasters, sports events etc) governed what words people used in search engines most. What this does is, it helps you to predict the searches that will be popular for next Christmas, and to examine seasonal trends you will be able to see how demand for various goods and services is likely to change throughout the year. If you want to check what season the keyword valentines day is popular, it does not take a genius to understand that February would be a good tip. Check for other words, and you will see they have peaks in their use, utilize this to your advantage and not have missed this important information if you do it in advance.

You will have benefits by identify seasonal trends and being able to plan marketing campaigns to coincide with traditional peak periods like Christmas or Valentines Day. In addition you will be able to determine the ideal timing for your marketing campaigns and predict traffic levels during low peak periods like the holidays.

Related Keywords

There may be keywords that are closely related to your web site’s purpose that you are not targeting. There could also be different words or names that have the same meaning as other words due to regional or cultural differences. Finding all of these words can be quite difficult, however making an effort finding these relationships can make the real difference compared to your competitors.

If you sell shoes, you should find all related terms to this word as well, like boots, footwear, sandals, nikes, adidas, reebok etc.

KEI Analysis. The keyword effectiveness index is an important index to understand and to evaluate. It can be quite easy to rank in the top 10 results for some search terms, but it can be very difficult for others. For this reason, the most popular search terms may not be the best terms to target.Using an example here to illustrate how important this index is for search of the right keyword/phrase for your web site, we will use the example Sidney hotel as a search word/phrase. The very best keywords have high popularity (as in a large number of searches), but are not very competitive, that is they do not appear on a large number of pages. This relationship is represented by the Keyword Effectiveness Indicator, or KEI. KEI is a logarithmic scale that aims to quantify the effectiveness of any search term. The KEI value is 0 to 10. It is similar in principal to the Richter Scale, commonly used to measure earthquakes, and this is a good way to think about the figures. When using KEI, keep in mind that KEI is only a basic measurement, whereas tools such as SEO Toolkit also check the other more important criteria, such as intitle, inanchor, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, PI Rank and the number of competing PPC ads on both Google and Yahoo.

Keyword Density Analysis .

Keyword Density tools are used for two primary SEO tasks: One is to check the density counts of the keywords used on your pages and second to dentify the keywords that your competitors are targeting.

There has been widespread discussion on the ideal keyword density for the primary terms used on a single page. This ranges from 3% up to, and over 15%. However, it is agreed that keyword density is used by search engines in their ranking algorithms and does affect the a page’s ranking. Keyword density analysis also make it extremely easy to identify the search terms that your competitors are using on their pages, and more importantly the search terms they are targeting. With the keyword density tool, you can easily see exactly where each term is used on a page, the number of times the term is used, if the term appears in the meta tags or links, and if the term is used in heading tags.

The keyword density analysis would load the specified URL and extracts all possible word combinations to create a list of search phrases and then cross references the extracted phrases with the Keyword Discovery search term database.

The density report enables you to quickly identify the frequency of popular search phrases used on your own web pages. In addition, by using the density tool on your competitor’s pages, it can provide valuable insight as to the search terms your competition is targeting.

Domain Researcher Tool

Quickly find potential high traffic and available to be registered domains based on popular keyword search terms. The Domain Researcher Tool can cross reference any search phrase if available as a .com or .net domain in real time.

Many domains are already taken, but with the batch keyword check feature, you can save time searching for that perfect domain that is still available. Checks 100 search terms at a time!

As you can check availability of domain based on searched for phrases, this tool is great to identify potential new high traffic domains or domains that not only describe your business or product but are already in the minds of potential customers.

I will not try to sell you any products here, and will therefore not recommend any tool above the other, however two main products stand out and those are Wordtracker and Word Discovery. Try them both and see what you think. Another solution is to hire an SEO expert and let him do the work for you, sometimes this is the best solution, as this person probably have done this type of work before and can turn around quality work at the shortest time as well. It can save you both time and money by having the optimal research done the first time. Also an idea to let this SEO expert run research every quarter, to update and refresh the analysis and what type of keywords/phrases are most suited for you at that given time. Some companies runs this analysis on a weekly or even more frequent level, in order to keep track on competitors and the type of keywords in trends at any given time. It is up to you and how dependant you are upon having traffic driven to your site or not, how much business you need for the next quarter or so.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you want some assistance in these matters, maybe I can assist you with your keyword/phrase strategy to make your web page or content on the web page more SEO friendly and create traffic for you and ultimately bring income to yourself and your business.

Keywords are an essential component of producing a web site. These are the words which the search engines use to help categorize and rank your pages. For instance, if your web site is about ‘writing articles’ then your keywords could include ‘writing’, ‘articles’, ‘article writing’ and so on.

The advice from many web designers and search engine optimizers has been to find as many keywords as you can. They advise you to search for keywords using a variety of online tools and software programs which can identify leading keywords. At first sight this seems attractive, but it actually defies logic.

Let’s take a look at the aim of a search engine. It’s job is to track down pages that meet the specific search term that a web surfer has typed in. The more closely the pages it serves up match the search term, the better it is for users. Search engines need to be as accurate as possible in delivering the right material to their users. Otherwise the web surfer goes elsewhere.

Now imagine you are a search engine algorithm – the mathematical program which calculates the probability of any web page matching the search term typed in. If the page has hundreds, or thousands of keywords you’ll be a bit confused. For instance, is this web page about ‘article writing’, or is it about ‘feature writing for journalists’. They are different things. You’ll end up knowing the page is relevant but not that relevant. So you rank it down the bottom.

But what if the page only has the keyword ‘article writing’ several times? You’re absolutely clear the page is about article writing and so you rank it highly.

Admittedly, it’s not quite as simple as this. But this is the principle of search engine technology. It is trying to find the most relevant pages that match the search term.

What this means for Internet marketers is that you need separate pages for each keyword. Focus each page on each individual keyword. Use the keyword in headings, sub-headings, the page text, the page title tag and in the meta tags. Avoid having pages which contain several keywords as that simply confuses the search engines and lowers your rankings.

So forget the advice to have hundreds or thousands of keywords. Go for single pages that match single keywords and you will find your page traffic increase.

This trick also works for Google AdWords. Each advert should apply to just a handful of keywords – you get much greater click through rates and therefore cheaper advertising when you only have a couple of keywords per advert. If you have hundreds of keywords you’ll find you’ll get greater results by having keyword specific ads, rather than one advert with hundreds of keywords.

So go against the advice of filling your pages and adverts with keywords. Go specific.

ROCKY

Dharmender Kumar asked:

Search engine optimization is a lot easier than you think. Although you need to gather a certain amount of information about your site, preferably before you build your site, once you have the right information, you can quickly and easily build a search engine optimized website that will get you traffic.

Below are five tips for optimizing and submitting your site to the search engines:

1. Know your market.

This step is absolutely crucial. You need to know exactly who you are marketing your business to. If you don’t, you can’t drive targeted traffic to your site.

The difference between targeted and untargeted traffic is glaring. Targeted traffic comes from those who are looking for your products and services. If you know exactly who you are marketing to, you’ll optimize your site for that market.

2. Target the right keywords.

Target the wrong keywords and no one will find you. That’s why it is really useless to use marketing tools like doorway pages.

The first thing you need to do is understand what your visitors are searching for.

The keyword terms you may want to optimize for, and what your potential customers are actually searching for, can be different.

Tools like Good Keywords can help you find out what others are searching for. The more times that a keyword or keyword term is searched for the better. To determine if you have a lucrative term, do a search in the search engines for the term. Make sure that you search for the exact term.

The more times a term is searched for, and the fewer the sites in the search engines, the more lucrative the term.

3. Learn search engine optimization.

When I first started marketing online, I read all of the guru stuff about buying banners, advertising, etc. The problem was that I just starting out. I was trying to make money, not give away everything that I had.

After becoming a search engine optimization marketer, I felt betrayed. Most of these people didn’t talk about search engine optimization because they didn’t do it. They simply took offline marketing techniques and adapted them to the internet.

Search engine optimization is one of those rare marketing techniques that have no corresponding offline marketing technique.

It’s an online technique. Period. If you want to be successful at it, then you need to learn how to do it. It’s not that hard.

One tool that can help you is Web CEO, This free software works for both PC and Mac. It includes all of the tools you need to optimize your site, and it’s free. It even includes step by step documentation to teach you search engine optimization: what works, what you need to know, and steps you can take to improve your rankings.

Read the documentation for this software, and you’ll know the most important things you need to know about optimizing your site for the search engines.

4. Optimize your site for the search engines.

Once you’ve learned the basics of search engine optimization, then it’s time to optimize your site for the search engines.

Start by selecting your keywords. You can use the Good Keywords software to help you.

You should optimize for no more than three keyword terms per page.

Once you have your keywords, plug your site into Web CEO. Remember, you are optimizing pages, not your site.

Analyze your site and see what changes you need to make. Once you’ve done that, you can edit and reload or upload your site to the internet.

5. Submit your site to the search engines.

There’s some disagreement on whether or not you should submit your site to the search engines, or whether you should just wait for the search engine spiders to find you.

I stand in the camp that says submit. The reason is that these search engines don’t always update the way they should, and although they claim that they will find your site, they may not.

I know this because I had one site that had never been found by MSN even though it was linked to all of my other sites and all of my other sites were fully included in MSN.

There are only five places that I recommend you submit, and you should do this manually. Although Web CEO has a submission tool, it’s better to submit your site manually.

Below is my list of where to submit your site:

These sites cover most of the internet. Before you submit, there are a few things you should know:

1. Alexi is part of Google search. You will get better results submitting here first. This site also allows you to include a thumbnail of your site. You will also get indexed faster.

2. Read the information on each site for getting included. The best way to learn how to market in any search engine is to read the information offered by the site. You’ll pick up valuable free tips directly from the source.

3. Once you’ve submitted your site, forget about it. Concentrate on building quality content and links to your site.

RUFUS

Keyword research in undoubtedly one of the most important aspects to consider when setting up your own online home business.

If you don’t target your keyword phrases effectively then you will be wasting both time and effort, performing tasks that will never pay off no matter how hard you try.

Here are some points to consider when conducting your keyword research:

1. Consider which tools you are going to use and save them to a one of your favourites folders for easy and frequent access. There are even some tools out there that allow you to download a tool bar with all the tools readily available. There are numerous free tools, many of which are very useful. I personally, use a tool called Keyword Elite to conduct my online keyword research.

2. What keyphrases are you going to target? – If you have very few resources available and are new to online marketing then it is advisable that you target ‘long tail’ keyword phrases. These are keyword phrases with 3-5 words, which make them a lot less competitive and easier to attain top rankings in the search engines.

3. Use a variety of keyword phrases for each campaign – Are you using the keywords in your website content or are they primarily for backlinking text? I would find two or three less competitive keyword phrases for each target market and use these to create backlinks through article submissions. Then, take ten different variations of these keyword phrases and use them in your website content.

4. Target profitable keyword phrases – Obviously the main aim of keyword research is to find profitable keywords. How can we do that? One effective way to target buyers and also find less competitive search terms is to find keyword phrases that contain certain words like, ‘buy’ as in ‘buy keyword research tool’.

5. Find untapped markets – Many of your competitors will be targeting all the same keyword phrases. This is where they fall down. Find obscure phrases that your target are already searching for and go after these by specifically writing articles based on these to achieve better or top search engine rankings. One good way to do this is by scanning your current website visitors and finding the keyword terms that sent them to your site.

Keyword research is only a beginning in building a profitable online business but it is an aspect of your marketing that cannot be overlooked. Effective keyword research is essential to ensure your business becomes a huge success and not a dismal failure.

Keyword Excavator is a new Latent Semantic Analysis tool from Jos Jongejan. I’d like to share with you some the many exciting features of this powerful software.

The first step in using Keyword Excavator after installation is to log in. Since this software is on your hosting server having a login requirement is a good idea for security purposes.

After that you’re presented with a place to input your keyword phrase and excavate on either Google, Yahoo, MSN live, or using a URL or even copying and pasting the contents of an article. You type in your keyword phrase and then you have an opportunity to select the language and the country typically what I do is select English and the United States as this is my main market. I then click on the button that says, “Dig Me Up Some Keywords!”. After that Keyword Excavator goes to work.

The amount of information you will get back is extremely amazing so give the software time to work its magic. The first thing you will see will be the latent semantic analysis summary which shows your key phrase, the language that you chose, the country that you chose, the search engine that you chose, etc.

The table below that then shows you a variety of different information from multiple search engines and also shows you a large number of narrower searches where you start to get into your 3, 4 and 5 word phrases, the Google advertisers for the key phrase with the actual ads they are right in a small window for you to see.

As we move down we have another incredible table to look at. This particular table shows you the top 20 sites for the key phrase that you chose. The table also show you at a glance such useful information as page rank, whether or not the key words are in the URL, whether the keywords are in the domain name or the keywords are in the title, the word count of the homepage, the key phrase count of the homepage, and the key phrase weight on the home page.

In addition to all this information the very next thing you’ll see is something extremely useful and that is a series of graphs. The first graph shows the Google page rank on the y-axis and the search engine position on the x-axis. The next graph shows Yahoo back links on the y-axis and the search engine rank or position on the x-axis.

This is very interesting information. I was surprised to see many sites without high page rank in the top 10 sites for my chosen key phrase. The next graph shows the page word count in relation to the search engine position this seems very interesting because you may find a data correlation here and any correlation is information you may be able to use to increase your ranking.

The next graph we see the page keyword count on the y-axis in the search engine position on the x-axis. As we move down the page we see page keyword weight on the y-axis and the search engine position on the x-axis. When they said that a picture is worth a thousand words look at these graphs and you can see at a glance what may or may not make a difference in your rankings. Just being able to see what the top sites all have in common is extremely valuable. There are also additional graphs that provide an even greater level of detail.

Li Ming Wong asked:


Some internet search engines are set up to look for keywords throughout a webpage, they then use a mathematical equation that takes in the amount of time the keywords appears on the webpage and factors it with the location of the keywords to determine the ranking of the webpage.

Other internet search engines use a process that judges the amount of times a webpage is linked to other web pages to determine how a webpage is ranked. The process of using links to determine search engine ranking is called link analysis.

Keyword searches and link analysis are both part of a routine internet search engine procedure called search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the art and science of making a website attractive to search engines, the more attractive a website appears to the search engine the higher it will rank in searches and in the world of internet searches ranking is everything.

As 2006 faced its last weeks, Google was the internet search engine that most internet users preferred. Approximately fifty percent of the times a consumer turned to a search engine for their internet needs they turned to Google. Yahoo! was the second favorite.

Most of Google’s popularity is credited to its preferred form of search engine optimization, a trademarked program Google dubbed PageRank. When PageRank was patented the patent was assigned to Stanford University.

PageRank was designed by Larry Page, (the name is a play on his name) and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University as part of a research project they were working on about internet search engines.

PageRank is based on the link analyses algorithm. PageRank is described as a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to each individual element of a hyperlink set of documents. The purpose is to measure its relative important with the set. The numerical weight assigned to any element is called PageRank of E. PR(E) is the denotation used.

PageRank operates on a system similar to a voting booth. Each time it finds a hyperlink to a webpage, PageRank counts that hyperlink as a vote that supports the webpage. The more pages that link to the page, the more votes of support the webpage receives. If PageRank comes across a website that has absolutely no links connecting it to another webpage then it is not awarded any votes at all.

Tests done with a model like PageRank have shown that the system is not infallible.

The HITS algorithm is an alternate to the PageRank algorithm.

Google’s powers that be take a dim view on spamdexing. In 2005 Google designed and activated a program called nofollow, a program they designed to allow webmasters and bloggers to create links that PageRank would ingnore. The same system was also used to keep spamdexing to a minumum.

Google has designed PageRank to be an eight-unit measurement. Google displays the value PageRank places on each website directly beside each website it displays.

It has been proposed that a version of PageRank should be used to replace ISI impact factor so that the quality of a journal citation can be determined.



AMOS

Daryl Campbell asked:


Say the words web site search engine optimization and many of us will reach for the extra strength Tylenol. The mountain of information you seemingly have to digest in order to improve search engine ranking can be daunting.

So why do people study web site search engine optimization like it is the finals of a college exam? Because the overwhelming majority of their (and your) site traffic will come from search engines. Optimizing your web pages the correct way can increase the ranking of your website and bring you more targeted traffic from people who are willing to buy your product, sign up for your opt in email list or take some other action. It also has the added bonus of increasing your link popularity since many other webmasters will be very anxious to exchange links with a high ranking site.

But do you really have to take a postgraduate course to learn search engine optimization seo ? Not necessarily. There are some basic tweaks that you can make right now to your web pages that have the potential to increase your search engine rank.

1. Web Site Content

If you want to know how to take some of the complexity out of web site search engine optimization this is it. I am sure you have seen many a site with dazzling graphics and awesome multimedia slideshows. None of that means anything, without good unique web site content. Have at least a minimum of 300 words per page. Also make sure your text is in HTML which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Don’t let this throw you. HTML is the way search engines read your webpages. If you want to learn html, I recommend the website of Dave Kristula at davesite.com . The main thing to focus on is writing quality useful web site content that will please your visitors as well as the search engines.

2. Keyword Search Terms

This is the reason eighty percent of your site traffic comes from search engines. If the internet is the information superhighway then keyword search terms are the guide posts. Choosing the right ones can be a science all its own. Use the free overture keyword (keyword) research tool to find terms relevant to your site content that people are looking for. Higher search results mean more competition. There is plenty of profit to be made in utilizing keywords that get anywhere from 500 to 5000 searches per month. You should then compile a list and use these keywords on every page of your website including the title.

However do not go overboard. Keyword stuffing is a red flag to the search engines. It reminds them too much of the many automatic website builders that scrape content from other sites and create web pages overloaded with keywords and little else. Keep focused on providing useful information and use the keyword search terms where relevant.

3. Meta Tag Optimization

Five years ago, I would have told you meta tag optimization was essential to your webpage. Nowadays search engines rank the importance of meta tags very low. Some do not consider them at all. So why use them? Because even if they a make up a small part of a search engine’s ranking formula, that is an extra advantage for you.

Meta tags are usually located at the top of a website. Just open your webpage in a browser window, click view on your menu bar and then select source. This is the HTML version of the webpage. You can also do this with FrontPage, Dreamweaver or any other web site building software. Find where it says meta name= keywords content and place your keywords between the empty quotations. Do the same with meta name = description and place a brief site description between the quotations. Meta tag optimization may have lost much of its importance but every little bit helps.

A good search engine ranking is important for any online business. While there is a lot to learn concerning website search engine optimization, just start with the simple steps we mentioned above. Keep in mind that if you give any web site search engine precisely what they want, they in turn will reward you with more site traffic and customers ready to take a look at your offer.



CORNELL