Keyword Selection

Keyword and Key Phrase Selection and Suggestion

Keyword and Phrase Selection
Choosing the correct keyword phrase(s) is the first, and one of the single most important aspects, of search engine success. If you have a niche market then this will probably be a little more straightforward, and the most obvious combination of keywords may bring results. For more popular keywords there will be a great deal of competition. Look for peripheral keywords to add to your core combination that will give you variations on the basic theme. The keywords you decide upon should also feature heavily in any submissions you make to the main online directories.

It's very easy with keyword phrase selection to be blinkered to anything beyond the obvious. Ask a cross section of friends, relatives and colleagues for 3 or 4 keywords they'd use to search for your product. Visit the search engines you're targetting, search using your primary keywords, and then examine the keyword metatags (using 'View > Source' from the browser menu) of several of the top pages, to see what keywords your competitors are using outside of your core group of keywords.

Keyword Suggestion Tools
There are a number of services, both free and fee based, that can suggest keyword combinations based upon millions of actual searches performed. These will provide you with a huge number of variations based upon you primary keywords, that you would never probably have considered. These tools also show how many times a particular keyword or phrase has been searched upon, enabling you to determine its popularity.

Keyword selection is not as simple as choosing the most popular and using these in your pages. The most popular keyword combination will inevitably also be the most competitive, so in many cases it is advisable to look at less popular keyword combinations of 2 or 3 words that are also less competitive.

The most powerful keyword selection service is provided by WordTracker. This is a most impressive service, drawing from over 350 million actual searches performed on metasearch engines. A free trial service is available at their site which will give you variations upon your keyword phrase, thesaurus suggestions, how many competing sites are returned from AltaVista using your keywords, and how many visitors you could expect from AltaVista in a 24 hour period. The full paid for service adds support for all the major search engines, pay-per-click websites, misspellings, a more sophisticated interface, and several other features. The cost depends upon the duration of the service your require from 1 day to 12 months, but is very reasonable, considering the quality of information they're giving you access to.

An idea of how popular a particlar keyword phrase may can be obtained from Overtures's UK keyword suggestion tool which provides a selection of actual searches performed based around your core keywords and also tells you how many times in the last month each keyword phrase was searched upon.

Overture doesn't permit variations on certain words eg. 'website' is always returned as 'web site' and plurals are always returned as singular in their suggestion tool. Using this tool in isolation can be misleading if used for the purpose of choosing keywords for search engines, since plurals can make quite a difference to your position in search results.

Espotting also offer a keyword generator tool which doesn't suffer from the limitations of Overture's suggestion tool, but this is only available once you have set up an advertiser account.

Results from the UK and US versions of Overture's keyword suggestion tool can be used for spelling and search volume comparison. Just ensure that you use the correct keywords and search estimates for your target market. Find the US version here.

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