Using Wordtracker to Improve Search Engine Ranks by Ryan Cole
Pay-per-click advertising is great for generating instant traffic to your site,
but how effective is it in the long term? Ideally, you'll continually optimize
your campaigns, but you may come to a point where your return on investment
levels off and there isn't any tweaking left to do. This could take weeks or
months, and it may lead to a fantastic ROI, but there's something better than a
fantastic ROI -- an infinite ROI. If you invest nothing but your own time into
optimizing your site for placement in the organic search listings (the free
ones), that's what your ROI will be -- infinite.
Search engine optimization is the best thing you can do to maximize your online
marketing results. For the uninitiated, search engine optimization (SEO) refers
to methods of making web sites "friendly" to the different search engines.
Optimizing your site doesn't necessarily guarantee high search engine
placement, but you'll have a much better shot at it than those whose sites
aren't optimized. And the core of search engine optimization -- the foundation
upon which you'll base your entire optimization strategy -- is the choosing of
keywords.
Anyone reading this article is likely to know that you can't simply guess when
it comes to keywords. It's possible to do everything else right but still fail
miserably because you optimized your site for keywords that don't get any
searches. So, at the heart of any optimization strategy lies solid keyword
research, and the best way to do it is to use a tool like Wordtracker.
Wordtracker is a keyword research tool that uses metacrawler information to
pull keywords and keyphrases from search query databases. (Don't worry if you
didn't understand that -- neither did I.) What it means is, Wordtracker helps
you find relevant keywords and then tells you how often they get searches.
Here's how to do it:
First, you'll need to sign up for an account. You can get a free trial, or you
can get a paid membership for a day, a week, a month or a year. The free trial
is severely limited and not very helpful; it shows results only for MSN, and it
allows you to research just 30 keywords at a time. You'll want results for
Google and Yahoo! most of all, and you'll have to go through hundreds or
thousands of terms before you find the really juicy keywords you'll want to
optimize for. That's why I recommend signing up for a one-day membership at
first. You'll get to try Wordtracker with all the features enabled, and a day's
membership only costs around seven bucks.
Once you have your account, log in to the members area. Click on "Keyword
Universe" (top left) and you'll get a screen prompting you to enter a search
term. Enter a generic term as a jumping-off point. For example, if you run an
online dating site, you should enter a term like "get dates online" or
"internet dating." It doesn't matter if the term is incredibly broad; we'll
narrow it down in the next step.
Let's go ahead and use the dating example for this exercise. I've entered the
term "online dating," leaving both the lateral and thesaurus match options
checked. This gives us a lot of different related terms we can expand upon,
including a bunch that we might not have come up with on our own.
I'll now click on "online dating" in these results, which brings up a new box
on the right side of the screen. This is a list of all the search queries for
the term "online dating" that appear in Wordtracker's database. The first
column ("Keyword") shows the search query; the second ("Count") shows the
number of times the search query appears in the database; the third ("Predict")
predicts the number of searches for that query in any given 24-hour period; and
the fourth ("Dig") lets you "dig deeper" to find even more specific variations
of that query (click on the shovel icon to dig deeper). Clicking on a search
query in this list will add it to your keyword basket, or you can choose to add
all of them at once. I'll add them all, and then click on the blue arrow in the
bottom right corner ("Click here for step 3″).
Now we have a few options. "Export Keywords" sends the list to a text file that
you can print out or cut-and-paste. "E-mail Keywords" lets you e-mail the list
to yourself or anyone else. "Competition Search" is what we're really after, so
click on that. This will bring you to a screen that lets you choose two search
engines to check for competing sites. Definitely choose Google, and you'll
probably want to choose either Yahoo! or MSN for your second one. Leave "KEI
Analysis" and "Quotes" set to "Yes," and then click "Proceed."
We now come to a page that ranks our keywords by KEI, or Keyword Effectiveness
Index. You'll notice that each search term has been assigned a KEI value. The
higher this is, the better the search term; i.e., pick a search term with a
high KEI value, and it'll be easier to optimize your site for it. Each term has
a different KEI depending on the search engine, so be sure to check the same
terms in different engines, depending on which ones you want to rank on.
According to Wordtracker, KEI is determined by comparing the number of
competing sites for that term with the number of times it appears in the
Wordtracker database. A KEI value of 10 or less means a poor keyword, between
10 and 100 is a good keyword, between 100 and 400 is an excellent keyword, and
400 and up is a great keyword.
The results for "online dating" don't look very good. Our best term for Google
is "dating agencies online in somerset," with a KEI value of 84.941. If this
happens to be your niche -- that is, online dating agencies in Somerset -- then
this is a fantastic keyword. For most of us, this would be pretty useless. We
can see that the next one down is "top online search adult dating service hiv
positive dating" with a KEI value of 22.091. Again, probably not quite the
niche we're in, and the KEI isn't nearly as high as we'd like it to be.
At this point, you'd go back to step one, choose a different result, and repeat
the process all over again. With some patience, you'll uncover those juicy
niche keywords with high counts and low competition, and these are the words
you'll optimize your site for.
Heard enough? Now go
sign up
for Wordtracker!
To view this article with Wordtracker screen shots illustrating each step, go to
the
main article page.
About the Author
Ryan Cole runs The Internet
Marketing Blog, a free site for information on Internet marketing,
Google AdWords, PPC, SEO, blogging, and more.
