Keyword Analysis

Keyword Analysis should be the first step you take in planning a new website or marketing campaign. Keyword Analysis will guide you in choosing the most effective keywords to base a site or advertising campaign upon, as it will tell you which keywords are frequently searched for, how many sites are already available targetting those keywords, and how achievable a good result on the search engines may be.

Basically, there's no use in building a site if no-one is looking for it. You need to know what people are looking for to decide if it's worth building.

Keywords are the words people type into a search engine, in the hope of finding your site. Choosing the right keywords is vitally important, and should affect your choice of domain name, design and site content. Keyword analysis will help achieve this.

As people become more sophisticated in their use of search engines, they tend to use keyword phrases, rather than a single keyword. For example "studded dog collars" instead of just "dogs". Many sites specifically target a keyword phrase on each page. You also have more chance of scoring a better ranking for a keyword phrase, rather than a single, popular keyword.

Initial Keyword Analysis
First of all, visit these sites to get some ideas on which keywords are currently popular, being searched for through search engines. (If you don't already have a favourite subject you plan to build your site about).

The Lycos Top 50
The Google Zeitgeist
Yahoo Buzz
MetaSpy
I also subscribe to the free weekly report from Wordtracker on the most frequently searched keywords.

Keyword Suggestion
Now that you have a rough idea of a subject or keyword you are interested in, you need to find related keyword phrases people actually use. Various free suggestion tools will "suggest" related phrases. They may also tell you how often the phrase was searched for. Take note of whether daily, monthly or yearly figures are quoted.

SearchIt is a fantastic new free search and keyword tool. It has a heap of search tools built into it: - keyword brainstormer, Adwords suggestor, Overture suggestor, monetization, competitors, and more. Plus they keep updating it when they think of a new tool. The only keyword suggestion tool you should ever need.

Yahoo search suggestion tool (formerly known as Overture Suggestion Tool ) returns a list of related phrases and how many times they were searched for last month. Although it does combine plurals, so you can't tell the difference between say flower and flowers.

Google search suggestion tool is available as an external tool, or if used through your Google Adwords login, it can also suggest cost-per-click advertising costs.

Goodkeywords (requires a download) also suggests keywords.

Advanced Keyword Analysis
Knowing how many times per day/month/year a keyword was searched for is not enough.

You also need to know the scope of the search database (was it only searches through Google? for one country or the world? ), and how many websites on that topic already exist.

Some keywords are so popular (eg home business) that you have buckley's chance of getting a top ten ranking for that keyword. So you need to analyse which ones are both popular, and have comparatively less competition.

Wordtracker provides a paid service which will analyse keywords in this way. They use a measure called KEI to measure competitiveness, where the lower the KEI, the less competition (and more achievable). You may have a one-time free trial of their services. So make sure you have used the Overture Suggestion Tool first of all to work out common keywords, and then go over to Wordtracker to analyse the competition for those keywords. I also receive their free weekly report on top keywords. WordTracker statistics are drawn from two main metacrawler search engines.

KeywordDiscovery is another leading provider of keyword analysis functionality. Limited functions are available for free. Their strength is in:

the breadth of statistics - search stats from over 100 search engines around the globe
keyword suggestion - misspellings, thesaurus, related words
keyword analysis - their own version of KEI to determine competitiveness
TheDowser Keyword Research Software was released in mid 2005, that brings together the different forms of keyword research covered above. There is a free version you can download, or upgrade to a full version, that even allows you to sell keyword research as a business. It has the ability to suggest keywords, retrieve link bids, research popularity, calculate KEI, drawing on databases such as Overture, Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery and other PPC engines. Very worthwhile.


KeywordElite is another keyword analysis tool that performs advanced analysis, including letting you spy on your Adwords competitors bids, and organise keyword lists.

Nichebot is a free tool allowingkeyword analysis for the top 15 related phrases for your keyword. It will also analyse the backlinks and Pagerank of the top 15 sites for your keyword.

A similarly useful tool based around Overture results instead of Google, is ResultsGenerator. Great for finding keywords related to your topic, how much people pay for them and how many times they search for them.

Using Keyword Analysis Results
The end result of this section is that you should have a list of preferred, achievable, keywords. Now you can start designing your site layout so that you can optimise your site to target one or two keywords per page.

Your goal is to optimise each page of your website, so that each page will be found for different (although related) keywords.

As a good webmaster/mistress, you will be planning to build rich content-filled pages. To earn money, you may be selling your own products, or have affiliate links to related products.

Many people also earn significant income from displaying Google's Adsense ads on their pages. This allows Google to display related-topic ads that other people have paid for, and you earn a percentage of what those people paid for their ads. Many people therefore search for topics where people pay large amounts to advertise, so they can earn a percentage of those large figures. Do a search at Google for lists of top-paying keywords.