This may be the most simple yet complicated part of SEO. I hope I don’t lose you here. If I do just back up and reread and things should come together.

I will do my best to keep it simple. A keyword phrase is words you type into a search engine. For instance if you wanted information on ballroom dancing you would go to Google and search for “ballroom dancing”. If you searched for “McDonalds” it is time for lunch or you need to hit the gym.

Basically any words someone puts into a search engine is a keyword phrase that the engine is going to look for sites relating to. That is why when you search for ballroom dancing you do not find McDonalds on the search results.

Since McDonalds will not have the words ballroom dancing on their website the search engine ignores it and you will not see it listed. So what are your keywords? Since your website is about ballroom dancing you should think of what a person may type into the search engine to find information on such a thing. The term “ballroom dancing” should be obvious as a keyword. You need many more though.

This is where a tool like Web CEO comes in handy. I could list all of the other tools and websites that offer keyword research but then how would I make my money from Web CEO? The concept is the same if you use it or not though so I am going to use it.

In your keyword research tool type in the most general term “ballroom dancing”. You should see a list of other related terms you may not have thought of. Take note of these and see if they match your topic enough that you could include them in your content.

Think of any other terms you can as well and search for those. By the end you should have a nice list of keywords picked out.

Think again… do you want to compete or submit?

What keywords will work best for you? So you see the main word you think someone would search for. Now it is time to see if it will work out for you. I never ever look at something SEO experts call the KEI (pronounced key). The KEI is supposed to tell you how good a keyword is by judging how many people search for that term vs. how many sites are in the search engines list for that term.

If 5,000 people searched for ballroom dancing and only 20 websites compete for that term the KEI would be high meaning it is a great keyword (by the way, if 5,000 people search for that term and only 20 websites compete for the term something is broke on the world wide web).

You are going to find more often than not that a keyword with good searches for it will have millions or billions of competition. I know it sounds scary but it isn’t.

I know your looking at me like someone tied to railroad tracks with a train coming and I have the nerve to say “It sounds scary but it isn’t”. That is because I know right before the train gets to you there are a lot of other tracks it is more likely to go down and avoid you.

Now here is why I don’t use KEI:

Say a keyword has 1,000 searches for it a month and it has 9,000,000 websites competing for that word trying to get to the top of the search results. The KEI will not be great. But then again what do we know about those competing websites? The best of them may not be that well off for the term.

Let me explain. A lot of sites rank well with little effort. Since there are so many sites people start to think it is impossible to compete. But when you examine the top websites in the searches you find out that you can do better than them. This means even though KEI told you there was not much reason to chose this word you should chose it anyway. In the same way if a keyword only had 20 websites competing for it and 5,000 people searching for it then the KEI would say use this word.

STOP!!!

Those 20 lone websites may be so well optimized and fortified that you will never be able to outrank them! This is why KEI is useless. How do you judge a keyword? While KEI doesn’t tell the whole story you do need to know how many people are searching for your term. If no one is searching for “rainbow colored ballrooms” then it may be best not to use that as a keyword. If a lot of people search for “ballroom dancing” on the other hand it is time to look into that word a bit deeper.

First how many sites are competing? No it doesn’t matter really, its just good to know in case you need to brag later about how many other sites you knocked out. What does matter is the number 1-10 sites that come up with that term. Again this is where Web CEO comes in handy for checking out your competition.

1. How well optimized is their site?

2. How many other sites link to theirs?

3. What is the page rank of those sites?

Page rank by the way is something google uses to find out the value of a website. The higher the rank the more important that page is. If a lot of important sites link to your competition then it may be harder to compete yourself.

This is how you tell if it will be easy or hard to rank well for that term.

If you like our tutorial, you can subscribe RSS Feed for more tutorials update.

Thanks for reading this tutorials.
 

Like our site? Be a member of Coolajax fan page to get daily posts updates!