Wordtracker
By Marty Pukstys, Tue Jan 10th
While many factors influence the rankings of a web site, anysearch engine optimization effort isn't worth even a second ofyour time without one and single unknown: relevant andcompetitive keywords.
Let's examine an example: a local moving company decided tooptimize its website. It knows (or assumes that it does) thatthe most popular keywords for their type of business are"movers" and "moving". At a first glance, looks likeeverything's fine: the keywords seem to be relevant, and shouldproduce good results. However, there are two mistakes made here.
The first one is keyword relevancy. What's the use for our localmoving company of people that are looking for "movers" or"moving" in Denver, CO, Boston, MA or New York, NY, if they arelocated and offering services in and around San Francisco only?
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Another mistake is keyword effectiveness. It'll take much moretime and effort to get top rankings for such popular andcompetitive general keywords as "moving" and "movers" than toget same results for something more specific and relevant, suchas "movers San Francisco" or "moving San Francisco". Not onlyare these keywords more likely to convert visitors to buyers,but also it's a much easier and less time-consuming task.
If the world we live in consists of atoms, the smallest and mostimportant particles in search engine optimization world arekeywords. In fact, there's nothing complicated about them, ifone remembers three things about keywords: relevancy,effectiveness and Wordtracker.
Wordtracker.com is an UK based company that offers anirreplaceable search engine marketing service tool: keywordresearch and analysis. It helps to find and pick keywords thatare both relevant and competitive. Relevant mean that thekeywords are related to your website, and that these are thewords people are typing in Google, Yahoo or MSN in order to findyour kind of business. Another important factor in determining a"good" keyword is its effectiveness. Let's say we have a keyword"movers" which has a record of appearing in Google search listfor 1009 times; there are 15400000 different web pages competingfor this keyword. This means that this keyword's effectivenessindex is 1009/15400000=0.066. This index shows that the keywordis far too competitive and you'll probably end up somewhere inthe middle of Google's search results if you try to optimizeyour webpage for this particular keyword. A rule of thumb is tofind keywords that are quite popular and at the same time havefewer webpages competing for them. A good keyword is consideredto have an effectiveness index of over 100, although anything inbetween 10 and 100 can be targeted as well.
Needless to say, without having the right keywords that are bothrelevant and competitive it's impossible to succeed in anysearch engine optimization campaign. Without knowing your nichewords, you'll probably end up competing against web sites withthousands of inbound links optimized by search engineoptimization gurus and will be lost in millions of searchresults - no one will even ever find out you exist. On the otherhand, all it takes to get your web traffic from 0 to couplehundreds a day might be something as simple and cost-effectiveas Wordtracker.
About the author:If you liked what you read - visit our Search Engine Marketing Service LLC website and find out moreabout search engine positioning services from our website optimization firm.
