Choosing and Researching Keywords - Using Technical Assistance
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Still having trouble coming up with keywords? Don't worry, help is available online! Google has a keyword suggestion tool called the Keyword Sandbox. It's intended for users of Google AdWords, but anyone can use it. Type in your general keyword, click enter, and you'll get two lists. On the left you'll see a long list of words that are more specific. Our "juggling" example in this case turns up everything from "juggling supplies" to "cat juggling" to "juggling tricks" to "juggling shows, " and on and on. The list on the right is very handy too; Google explains that "Users who searched for your keyword(s) also searched for the following terms." This will turn up things that you might not have thought of as being related (like "unicycle," in this case), as well as common misspellings.
Overture also has a keyword selection tool. Type in a general search term, and it will not only give you a list of keywords that are related to that term, but it will also tell you how many times each of those words and phrases were searched on for the previous month. Again, this tool is designed for people who are looking to advertise; Overture is a pay-per-click search engine, and is designed to give users an idea of what terms to bid on, and how high to bid. Keep in mind that users will often check their own rankings after bidding for spots on Overture, so you might get distorted results. Still, it should give you a general idea of the popularity of the terms you're considering.
WordTracker, as I mentioned, is one of the most popular keyword research tools. They offer a free trial, for which you must register. After putting in your name and your email address, you get a friendly screen that allows you to start the trial (and includes a link to WordTracker's privacy policy). Click the link, and you get a screen in which you enter a general keyword. WordTracker will show you 30 keywords related to your keyword, as well as tell you how many keywords you would have seen with the full version of WordTracker (in the case of "juggling," it would have been 287!).
Click the words you'd like to research further and WordTracker will show you the information it has for the word in its database, set up as a nice chart. The data is taken from all Dogpile and Metacrawler queries over the previous 120 days. The chart has four columns: one with the keyword and its variations (for instance, "juggling equipment" includes such variations as "custom juggling equipment," "fire juggling equipment," and so on for 72 entries); count, which shows the number of times a particular keyword has appeared in the database (giving you a feel for how often users search for the phrase); predict, which is "the maximum total predicted traffic for all of the major search engines/pay per bids and directories today;" and finally, dig, which lets you closely examine the results for just one keyword out of the chart.
When you use dig, WordTracker applies its Keyword Effectiveness Index, which compares the number of times a keyword appears in their data with the number of competing web pages to help you determine which keywords are most effective for your campaign. Here, we discover that "custom juggling equipment," when measured in the MSN search engine, has a KEI of less than four -- not very good at all, according to WordTracker. (In the fee-based version of WordTracker, KEI is measured for all other search engines as well).
I strongly suggest you try out each of these tools for yourself, particularly WordTracker. Once you do, you should have enough information to move on to the next phase, choosing the actual keywords that you will (finally) start using to optimize your site!
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