Preparing to Research Keywords and Getting Suggestions

After defining your strategic keywords and key phrases, it's time to start your preliminary keyword research. Ideally, this step should forestall domain name selection, copywriting and content compilation, so that you can create content with the exact keywords for each page already in mind, and then form your domain name and file names based on this initial keyword research. The aim of the preliminary research is to assemble a core base of keywords with the highest potential, so you can use this material when selecting the domain name and creating the file structure for your website. More importantly, this research creates a basket of keywords which form the basis for a latter stage of advanced investigation where you will need to pick out the keywords to actually use in optimization.


As a result of this step, a list of keywords is expected which contain from 5 to 20 keyword suggestions for EACH of your Web pages.


The preliminary research consists of getting keyword suggestions and evaluating each keyword against two basic parameters, Competition and Daily World Searches, thus allowing selection of optimal keywords.


Keyword suggestions can be obtained by using one of the many free and paid tools and web-based services, as well as by extracting them manually from the top-ranked pages. In whichever case, you start with one strategic keyword or key phrase and then get many.

For free tools/services, you can check out www.goodkeywords.com or the Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture)keyword suggestion tool (http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/). Among the most popular paid tools we could mention is WordTracker (www.wordtracker.com).

It's also a good idea to see how and on which keywords your competitors position themselves. Go to a search engine, like Google, and type your starting strategic keyword in the search box. It will show up with a list of results. Open the first ten results in your browser, right-click somewhere on the page and select "View HTML (page) source" (this menu item may slightly vary depending on the browser you use)


Now look for the keyword Meta tag (this where you will see every search term they are targeting):

META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="term 1, term 2, term 3 ... "

This should be in the first few lines of the page source. If you don't see it then ignore this page, go back to the search results and pull up the source of the second page in the list.


In the Content section of this tag are all the search terms and keywords that this page is targeting. Actually, this may make a good addition to your own list of keyword suggestions.
Web CEO Keyword Suggestion Tool

For this course, we use (and recommend that you use) the Web CEO Keyword Suggestion Tool, as it uses a keyword database regularly updated from many search engines and helps us conduct both preliminary and advanced research with maximum convenience and relevance.


As you remember, after obtaining a list of keyword suggestions, evaluate each of them against two parameters: Daily World Searches and Competition.


Daily World Searches. It is virtually impossible to count how many times people search the Web daily for "ice cream" or "stock quotes". Most search engines keep this information secret for commercial reasons. However, some search machines, especially Meta-search engines, offer you the so-called "live searches" statistics, i.e. they tell you how often a word has been searched on the engine during a specific period of time. The most trustworthy suppliers of the "live searches" data are MetaCrawler-MetaSpy (www.metacrawler.com), Lycos (www.lycos.com), and Entireweb (www.entireweb.com). Additionally, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) (http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/), one of the most popular and powerful commercialized search engines, has its own keyword suggestion tool with monthly searches information.


The Keyword Suggestion Tool of Web CEO that we will use processes the information obtained from a total of 37 sources. It then approximates the total number of world searches for the given search phrase made on all search engines of the planet, including Google (although the source data is not obtained from Google directly, of course).

Daily World Searches is a very useful piece of information: the higher this index, the more visitors this keyword will refer to us if we optimize for it. Remember this factor as most important for the keyword research operations.


Competition. Most SEO tutorials will tell you that "Competition", or "Supply", refers to how many sites are given out by the search engine for a certain search term. For instance, if you open Google, type "digital camera", and it finds 129,000,000 results. 129,000,000 will be your "competition" the theory goes, because your site must outplay them all to appear in the first 10 results.




Example of Google SERP for

Sean Burns, the author of "Rankings Revealed" (www.webmastersreference.com) has an interesting point of view. He claims you actually have to outperform only 10 sites (the current top-ranked ones) to achieve the desired result. Here are his words:


"Basically, the number of competing pages is something that you should try to ignore. I can tell you how many competing pages there are for any keyword without even doing a search - 10. Your goal is to get in the top 10 for each and every keyword you target so that is the only "supply" figure that you need to focus on."


Nevertheless, Mr. Burns further agrees (along with many) on the point that your actual competition is generally made by all sites which are optimized (intentionally or not) for your strategic key phrase.


Although the numerous sites that appear to be your competition are not necessarily optimized for your keyword, they WILL stand in your way because they are full of relevant content and the search engine considers them important, therefore they've got high rankings. That's why terms with low competition are advised as more preferable.

For the moment, we will consider the "supply" our raw Competition figure, as it will do for our preliminary research. Later, in the course of the advanced investigation, we will refer to many other parameters.


Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). Actually, this isn't as monstrous as it sounds. Developed by SEO expert Sumantra Roy (the author of LinkExplore software, www.linkexplore.com), it crowns the preliminary research by combining the data about Competition and Daily World Searches.


The formula for KEI is KEI = (DS^2/C) = (DS/C * DS), where DS is the number of daily world searches and C is the competition. The KEI ranges from 0 to over 400.

* < 0.001 = Poor keyword
* 0.001-0.010 = Good Keyword
* 0.010-0.100+ = Excellent Keyword

So, the actual aim of our preliminary research is to obtain a list of keyword suggestions based on our initial strategic keywords and then determine the ?KEI? for each of them. The higher the KEI, the more traffic this keyword will theoretically have, since the competition is low and the daily searches number is high. With the KEI, we will select from the best five to twenty suggestions for each of our pages.
So here are main points you should remember from this lesson:

1. The aim of preliminary keyword research is to compile a list of keyword suggestions for every page of your site, based on the one strategic keyword you had in the beginning.
2. Focus on terms with a high number of daily searches and preferably low competition, without damaging the relevance.
3. KEI - Keyword Effectiveness Index - will help you determine the best suggestions possible with the help of a keyword suggestion tool.