Some of The Basics Of Keyword Research

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Keyword research is a very important step in website development and search engine optimization. I’ve talked to some Internet marketers, newbies of course, who purchase a domain name before they do their keyword research, if they do it at all. Why? It is pretty well established that your keyword in your URL is a very important aspect of search engine optimization and attaining the rankings you want for your website.

There are some simple basics to keep in mind for keyword research, however. It’s a simple process, but if you go about it wrong you could end up in the wrong business, so to speak.

No. 1, there are two sides of the keyword equation. Supply and demand.

The supply is how many websites that are targeting a specific keyword. Just go to each of the search engines and type in a keyword and see how many websites come up for that keyword. That’s your supply number.

Demand is the reference to how many people are searching for your keyword each month. Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker and a few other tools are available to help you figure that out. But what you want to do is get your hands on the number of people who are conducting searches for each of your potential keywords.

Next, you need to figure out the profitability potential of each keyword. Some people call it a keyword effectiveness indicator (KEI), or index.

To figure your KEI you’ll divide your demand number by your supply number. In other words, if Google shows 1,000 websites for the keyword phrase “redheaded midget wrestling” but you find that 400 people per month are searching for that phrase then your KEI will be .4. That’s a 40% ratio.

Of course, this number by itself means nothing. It can only have meaning relative to other keywords. So put all your keywords into a spreadsheet and sort them by KEI. The higher the number the more valuable that keyword is. Even still, a highly valuable keyword may not be any good for your site concept so be sure that you toss out any keywords that doesn’t match your concept.

That’s a quick way to determine a value for your keywords and decide which ones are the most valuable for your website.