Keyword Research For Beginners

This is page 4 of a 5 page keyword research tutorial.

If you've read this far, AND have done the homework assignments, you've made real progress and are now about to graduate from novice to apprentice.

We've learned that in order to compete successfully with a big world full of webmasters, we have to learn how to analyze keywords, and find those keywords that represent the best opportunity for high search engine listings, and the free traffic those listings will bring us.

On this page we'll begin discussing the subject of keyword analysis in more depth. This discussion will prepare us for the following page, where you'll begin using a professional level keyword analysis tool on large lists of real keywords.

Finding Profitable Keywords

Let's step back from the subject of search engines for just a moment, and introduce a tool that can give us some insight in to the profit potential of different topics.

One of the easiest ways a novice webmaster can make money from a web site is by installing Google Adsense advertising on your web pages. You can see Google Adsense ads on this page to the right.

To make a long story short, the more advertisers pay to be displayed in Google ads, the more money you make from showing the ads. Some topics are cheap for the advertisers, and make relatively small income for you, while other topics are more profitable.

Here's a free tool that can give you a quick ballpark idea of roughly how profitable a keyword might be.

Please click here to begin.

You can start exploring this tool by entering a keyword at the very top left of the screen.

Then you should complete the security check-in in the left hand frame.

The point of this tool is that it helps you see what advertisers are paying for ads on Overture, Yahoo's pay per click advertising network.

It's a competitive market, and prices to rank high on Overture vary widely from keyword to keyword. On some topics paying 10 cents per click will get you a good listing on Overture, on other topics you might have to spend a couple dollars per click or more.

This tool doesn't tell you exactly how much you'll make from your Adsense ads, but it does give you a ballpark overview of the keyword market and a general idea which keyword niches are likely to pay the best.

This tool is free and easy to use, and while the information it provides is not precise, it's a whole lot better than knowing nothing at all about the profitability of different keywords.

If advertisers are paying less than 25 cents per click, your topic is modestly profitable.

The 25 to 75 cent range is healthy profitability.

Ad prices above 75 cents indicate a highly profitable, and most likely highly competitive niche.

You can concern yourself with profitability calculations, or not.

If this is your first web site, or the first time you are trying to get serious about keyword research, my suggestion would be that you focus on writing great articles on topics you enjoy, AND on getting a solid understanding of how keyword research works.

Don't worry too much about the money until you've mastered the basics of getting good traffic from search engines.

In the beginning, it's probably more productive to have modest success in less competitive niches than it is to go up against the big boys in the really profitable markets, with likely discouraging results.

Small successes are better than big failures, right?

In any case, when you are ready to do profitability research, now you know how to get started.

Page Rank Research

Alright, now let's get back to mastering the basics of keyword research for search engine traffic.

On the last page we talked about how Page Rank is used to measure the popularity of pages and determine the ranking of different pages in the search engine listings.

More specifically, we discussed how the best opportunity for high rankings exists when the pages within the top ten results for a keyword have modest page rank, say 3 or less.

If you have a flash of inspiration for an article, and want to do some very quick keyword research, you can zip in to SEO Chat to see what kind of page rank the top listed pages have for the keyword you are considering.

If the lowest page rank within the top 10 is a 1 or 2, AND you create an article that is clearly focused on the keyword, AND you place the keyword throughout the article in the appropriate places, you've got a promising shot at a good listing on the search engines.

This method of keyword research is fast, easy, low tech, and inefficient.

You can't research large numbers of keywords this way because it simply takes too much time.

And sometimes analyzing large numbers of keywords is what you need to do to find the most promising topics.

Luckily for us, there are inexpensive tools available that allow us to analyze thousands of keywords a day, tens of thousands even.

We're almost ready to explore these tools, but first we'll explain the research concept these tools are built around.

Keyword Effectiveness Index

If you've been reading (and maybe re-reading) carefully you know that our challenge is to find keyword niches that get a decent amount of traffic, but aren't too competitive.

Our analysis will be all about balancing popularity and competition. We want the most readers, and the fewest other webmasters fighting us for those top search engine listings.

To address this issue a leading search engine expert, Sumantra Roy of 1stSearchRanking.com, has developed what he calls the "Keyword Effectiveness Index". Webmasters more commonly refer to this by the abbreviation "KEI".

KEI counts the number of web users searching for a keyword in a given period. Then it counts the number of pages on the web containing the keyword.

Ideally, you are looking for a keyword that receives lots of searches, but is not addressed on too many pages.

The KEI formula balances these two factors, and represents the opportunity in a single number, so that you can easily compare the opportunity of one keyword against another.

This might sound a bit complicated at first, but really it's simple. The higher the KEI number, the more promising the keyword.

The good thing about KEI is it is easy to gather the data needed, so you can do automated analysis on large numbers of keywords.

The bad thing about KEI is that it looks at the keyword market in a very general overall way. For instance, it tells you nothing about who is listed in the top 10 search engine results.

As we said at the beginning of this tutorial, there is no perfect keyword research method, and all the techniques have their pros and cons.

Now that you understand the basic terminology we'll begin exploring Wordtracker, a very popular keyword research tool that helps us do KEI analysis on large numbers of keywords.

Homework Assignment

If you're new to webmastering in general, or keyword research specifically, it can be really helpful to have friends to discuss your questions with. Now might be a good time to take some time out and start building, or adding to, your personal advice network.

There are many places on the Net where you can discuss search engine optimization, but if you're new to this you'll want to avoid the specialized forums where people fully immersed in search engine work dive deep in to the details.

Here are two forums that do a good job of bringing newcomers and more experienced webmasters together.

Lynn Terry and her gang are a group of friendly helpful people. You can find them at Lynn's Self Starter's Weekly Tips Forum.

Allan Gardyne's Associate Programs Forum is also a great source of information, advice and friendship. Allan is the Net's leading authority on affiliate programs. I've known him 10 years, and have always been impressed with his knowledge and willingness to help others get started in the business.

Your homework for today is to find a forum where you are comfortable discussing your ideas and questions about search engine issues.

On the next page, we'll get you going using Wordtracker, the Net's most popular keyword research tool. See you there!

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