A keyword strategy to get a good search engine ranking

Everyone wants to get a top search engine ranking. Choosing the right keywords is an essential. Here's how to adopt a winning strategy for keyword marketing.

Increasingly, competition for top search engine ranking is hotting up. Try getting the number 1 spot for "e-commerce" on any of the search engines. Even try getting in the 1st 1,000! Not possible, is it?

And the chances are that the most popular keywords for YOUR web site will present similar problems. What can you do about it? You need an effective keyword strategy. Here's a powerful tool that uses the familiar "supply and demand" technique. You find keywords that a lot of people are searching on, but which do not return a lot of pages in the search engines.

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How big is the demand for a keyword?
First: DEMAND for a keyword - how many people are searching for it, or a variation. The easiest way to get a feel for the demand for a particular keyword is to use the Overture search engine facility:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

[Note: sometimes this site is NOT available. If you get the "page not found" error, bookmark the web address and try later]. In the box on that page, type in one of your keywords. Let's say you are in the jewellery business. Type in "necklace" and GoTo will tell you that in the last month the keyword was searched on 5,561 times. But it ALSO tells you that "pearl necklace" was searched 1,124 times and "diamond necklace" 966 time. And so on for a raft of associated keywords and phrases. [Note: these figures were found in late 2001 - you may get different figures].

Now copy and paste this list into a spreadsheet for future reference.

Further help on this topic...

You'll find further help on this topic, or closely related issues, in the side columns on this page..

Is there an over-supply of that keyword?
But what about SUPPLY: Here, you use one of the big search engines - say AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com) or Google (http://www.google.com). Take each of the keywords and phrases generated by GoTo and do a search on AltaVista. Near the top right of the screen, it will say how many pages it found. Enter this number into your spreadsheet.

In our example, AltaVista found 218,775 pages for "necklace" 10,052 pages for "pearl necklace" and 4,597 for "diamond necklace"

Now we need a way of evaluating supply against demand. Clearly, the number of searches for a particular keyword is very important, but it's no use if there is too much competition for that word.

Calculating the "Keyword Supply and Demand Index" (KSDI)
One suggested formula, easily applied to a spreadsheet is to square the "demand" count, and divide it by the "supply" count. The higher the resulting number, the better chance you have of scoring higher in the search engine lists. So you can then use the spreadsheet to sort the keywords in order of the KSDI.

In our example, the KSDI is 141 for "necklace", 126 for "pearl necklace" and 203 for "diamond necklace" So "diamond necklace" is a better keyword than either of the other two!

Incidentally, if you are using Excel as your spreadsheet, and if you put the demand figure in Column E, supply in Column G, then the formula for the KSDI is:

=IF(G4<>0,E4^2/G4,0)

With a bit of practice, you can generate this data quite quickly - manually, it took me about 20 minutes check 40 GoTo-generated keywords on AltaVista and then sort them in order of the KSDI.

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