Keywords and Keyword Research

In the beginning was the Keyword
Keyword research is the first thing you start thinking about when considering traffic from search engines. You don't? Well, you should. Keyword research must precede any serious search engine optimization work. This fact becomes obvious when you dive in: you can't take the first keyword that occurs to you in connection with your business, and optimize the Web pages accordingly.

Imagine for a moment that you want to start selling Web hosting services, and optimize your pages for "Web hosting service" or just "Web hosting", without any prior keyword research. You will hardly receive any traffic from the search engines, taking into consideration that the competition for this keyword is monstrous and your new page has no chance to appear among the top 30.

After you learn this lesson, you'll probably want to re-optimize your site for a less competitive keyword like "MyBestCompany Web Hosting", where "MyBestCompany" refers to your company name and the competition is now dead because no one else has yet had a chance to include your company name into their website (and, moreover - in title). Again, you receive no traffic: since your business is new to the Web, no one has ever heard of it and no one types your company name in the search engines to find you, except probably yourself, your friends, family and colleagues who are curious because yesterday you told them you've just opened.

Failing to spot which keywords will bring good volume of targeted visitors may definitely have far-reaching effect on your business. Having learned that lesson, you are on the right way now - looking for a decent keyword research service that will tell you which terms are both moderately competitive and frequently used by your prospects to find the goods or services they need.

Keyword research and how SmartSEO™ can help you
SmartSEO™ offers you an excellent service using a specific keyword research program. Our Keyword Tool will spy the competitors' pages to find out what keywords or phrases they use to gain top positions; it also can use our proprietary keyword database of real searches to get valuable suggestions. At this point, we will see how competitive each search term is, and how often it is used by the searchers. Our keyword research software will also calculate the so-called KEI (keyword effectiveness index) from these two figures, and we sort the keywords by this parameter and see which terms have the best demand-to-competition ratio!

But our research only begins with these simple numbers. The next step will be to research your top 10 competitors for each keyword, and see where the competition is weakest. For instance, if the keyword "digital camera" or similar takes you to compete with monsters like eBay and Amazon and the like, you will probably want to switch to another one where the competitors are more vulnerable in terms of search engine optimization.

At this step, SmartSEO™ keyword research service gives you the following possibilities:

• a window into the real-time search results of each search engine for the given term;
  
• the possibility to switch from one keyword to another and fetch the corresponding search results - with a single mouse click;
  
• real-time calculation of Google PageRank inserted above each competitor (regardless of the search engine you investigate right now) so you can quickly see the PRs of the top-10 sites.
  

That said, our keyword research service SmartSEO™ already gives you the competitive edge: not only can we spy your competitors and top sites for keywords they're using - we can find and research your own terms and predict how well this or that one will work for your site.

But the real fun begins in the 4th part of SmartSEO™: we will research each keyword's competition as thoroughly as you'd probably never expect from any other service. When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the keyword competition becomes a complex measure of the leaders' strength that consists of their link popularity, Google PageRank and Search Volume, Alexa Traffic Rank, overall number of pages that have included that key phrase in their TITLE tags, prices that the leaders pay to stay in the top of the paid search results etc., etc. SmartSEO™ will quickly report all this data to you in one convenient table, allowing you to reshuffle keywords according to any parameter, finally discovering those special "money terms".

We turn keyword popularity research into fun
The keyword research algorithm described above looks complex, but it certainly works extremely well. We enter your base keyword and our program will return words used by the top-ranked sites. We can then do further "research" - and SmartSEO™ will retrieve up to 1,000 suggestions based on live searches data from over 40 world search engines, and arranged by the number of daily searches. Finally, we produce a competition analysis report providing you with the most vital details. Having this report at hand, we will have an optimal base and can then decide which keywords suit you best in terms of popularity and relevancy.

More about the factors making up a keyword's potential
In the early days of keyword research, webmasters evaluated a keyword's potential by calculating a simple demand-to competition ratio. Competition meant how many pages could be found on a search engine for this keyword. E.g. if you typed "Web Design" and Google returned "results 1-10 from 4,560,849 found for Web Design", those 4,560,849 pages would be considered "competition". Next, it was necessary to know how many people searched for this keyword daily. For this purpose, webmasters and optimizers used the numerous online keyword research services that gather the so called "live searches data" from smaller search engines and meta-search engines.

In our days, these simple calculations aren't sufficient any more for mission-critical research. For instance, your competition is better expressed by the number of pages that contain the key phrase in their TITLE tags, rather than elsewhere on their pages. The first group of keyword research factors makes the "absolute"part of our keyword research since they don't depend on any given website, rather on the Web situation as a whole. Here belong:

• Monthly world searches (how many times a month this key phrase is used in searches);
  
• Search Volume estimated by Google;
  
• KEI (keyword effectiveness index);
  
• Current bids for the first positions in paid / sponsored results (the higher the bid, the harsher the competition), estimated everage click per day and cost per day.
  

Next, since search engine optimisation hardly makes sense if it doesn't aim at getting into the top-20 (most web surfers only look through the first 20 results returned for their query), our keyword research considers the sites on the top 20 positions as your closest competitors. The key idea of the keyword research is to find the keywords where your competitors are the weakest. So it's not merely keywords that we evaluate, we evaluate the competitors for the given keyword indeed. The group of the factors related to leading sites is what we call "relative", or "website-dependent" factors:

1. Google PageRank of the leaders;
   
2. Link Popularity of the leaders (how many other Web pages link to the top sites);
   
3. Alexa Traffic Rank of the leaders (shows how much traffic you'd get if you attained the top position).
   

All these factors, absolute and relative, will help us estimate whether or not a search term is popular enough, and how competitive it is, and, finally, whether it makes sense to use it for optimisation.

Seems too sophisticated?...
Not for us - Keyword Research has never been so easy, on one hand, and so serious - on the other. With our SmartSEO™ Keyword Research service, we get your SEO campaign jump-started.

Contact us for a free website analysis now.