By Elmer on March 5, 2009

One of the most important steps in optimizing a website is keyword research. Keyword research is the process of determining keywords that are suitable to a particular website. If we have a website that we need to optimize for search engines, it’s not enough that we have content and images. We also need to find out if the language our website is using is the same as our target audience, and whether our chosen keywords are also used by many of other websites. Before heading towards keyword research action, let’s ask ourselves first the following questions:

a. What is our aim for setting up this website? (Sell products, make our company known, promote our courses)
b. Who are our target audience? (Chinese immigrants in Canada, Overseas Filipino Workers worldwide)
c. Are we providing the language these people wil be using to reach our site? (”bar” in some countries are “pub” in others)
From the answers to these questions we can compose our initial list of keywords. We can also look at competitor websites, our log files for more information. Once we setup our keywords, we need to identify which one is more appropriate that the other. We should then look into two parameters that could define the importance of our keywords.

Keyword Popularity
With keyword popularity, we determine how many times a keyword may have been used by search engine users. Therefore, if the keywords found on our website are often used by our audience, we can conclude that we have a  line up of competitive keywords.

As stated in my previous blog entry about choosing the right SEO vendor, there are companies that try to offer guaranteed rankings may have selected keywords that are unpopular (no one searching for them) or easy to rank pages (brand names of their client) so don’t fall for these schemes until you are sure you are asking for guarantees for popular keywords.

Keyword Competitiveness
Keyword competitiveness refers to how many other websites are competing against us with respect to a certain keyword. Naturally, popular keywords are also highly competitive that it becomes difficult for a newbie website to rank anywhere near the top 30 rankings. But there are also keywords that aren’t necessarily competitive while highly popular. These are “newsmaker” keywords whose popularity resonates from offline to online. Examples are breaking news items whose details are not immediately available online. But such instance of low competitiveness and high popularity scenario doesn’t last long. As more people write content about such topics, competition heats up and there may be little or no visitor traffic available for late comers.

How Do We Measure Keyword Popularity and Competitiveness?
I believe there is no tool that measures exact popularity of keywords, only approximations relative to other keywords. This is because of many factors search engines consider. One of which is an instance where website owners check the ranking of their pages 5 times a day on one particular keyword, with no other intent but check the rankings. Competitiveness of a keyword may also vary from time to time. Perhaps a spike in “greeting cards” a few weeks before Mother’s Day and Valentines Day? That is why search engines make these adjustments from raw search volume data.

Keyword Popularity Tools
WordTracker
KeywordDiscovery
Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Measuring Keyword Competitiveness
One easy way to determine keyword competitiveness is to use search engines and perform search query. In the results page, you see the number of results. Most of these results are approximate and many websites included on search results are not direct competitors. But for a keyword with millions of results, this shows that we may have to pay attention even to those we don’t consider as competitors.

Once we have the list of keywords and evaluated for competitiveness and popularity, we can then develop our content (blog, meta tags, copywriting guidelines and general language of the site) using the keywords we extracted. This should ensure that we use terms that are similar to the ones our target audience is look for.

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