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Some good news for anyone who does any SEO or keyword research for their website.

Google has now started publishing the actual search volume for keyword phrases. Previously Google just displayed a little graph to help people determine the search volume of a particular phrase, but now they are showing the actual number of searches for both the previous month and the average number of searches.

 You can use this tool for free here:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Prior to this, using Wordtracker was the best way to estimate search volume for a particular phrase, but because Wordtracker uses only a small percentage of searches from meta engines and multiplies this up to give estimates for Google, MSN, Yahoo etc, it wasn’t always accurate.

It will be interesting to see what changes Wordtracker make as a result of this new feature from Google.

 I am still going to use Wordtracker as it is the best way of getting together a quick set of statistics about keywords, taking into account the competition, but I will now be able to cross check all my phrases using the Google tool to make sure that I haven’t picked a duff keyword.

Earlier I talked about researching keywords to get a higher search engine rank. Once you have a big list of keywords from Wordtracker how do you go about picking the right keyword phrase for your website?

Luckily Wordtracker uses an indicator called the KEI, which is the Keyword Effectiveness Index. This gives you a rough idea of how effective a keyword will be. The more searches per day that a keyword has, the higher the KEI will be and the less competitors a keyword phrase has, the higher the KEI will be. In an ideal world you want a phrase that has a high number of searches and a low number of competing pages, but often these are hard to come by. Usually a highly searched on phrase has a lot of competitors and a phrase that is searched on rarely has a much lower number of competitors.

It’s all about finding balance. If you are optimizing an important page on your site such as the index page or a product page, you need to consider your keywords carefully and ensure that you pick a phrase or combination of phrases that has a good number of searches per day. Use the total number of competing pages as an indicator of the competition, but also pay a visit to Google and enter your keywords (without the quotes)  to see which sites have the highest ranking for these keywords. Take a look at these websites and ask yourself is this keyword too competitive for you? If the answer is “yes”, then it is back to your keyword list to check out some other phrases.

When optimizing an inner page of your website of a blog post you don’t need to spend as much time analyzing this. You don’t need to worry as much about picking a phrase with a high number of daily searches. You can pick a low competition, low search phrase and benefit from optimizing lots of different inner pages and blog posts for a wide range of low competition phrases. You can generate a lot of easy traffic to your website using this method.

This is one of these questions where the answer is “it depends”!

When you are choosing a keyword phrase to optimize the main page of your website for you should always as the question “is this keyword phrase too competitive”? Being on page 10 of the search engine results aint gonna do you much good, so you need to be sure that you can climb above your competition and get that higher search engine rank.

The “competing pages” statistic in Wordtracker will act as a good guide for you, but you need to go further than this.

Here is what I do:

(1) I use the “competing pages” as a quick guideline for me to narrow down my keyword list

(2) The important part - I choose a potential keyword, then I go to Google and I type in that keyword exactly as it is (without quotes). I then look at the websites that are on the top of page 1 and page 2 of Google and ask myself the following question:

Can I beat this website?

By this I mean, is this a website that has so many backlinks that I am never going to get anywhere near it? Or is it an authority or big company website (e.g. Microsoft) with so many staff working to promote it that I will never get anywhere near it?

I usually use http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ to check the backlinks of these site.

If you do this, then hopefully you will be able to answer this question, which boils down to “have you got enough time to build more/better quality backlinks than this website”? It really all depends on you, your experience and how much time or money you have available!

Of course, there are other factors as well, but this one is the biggest factor when it comes to ranking well in Google.

Keyword research is an area that many webmasters forget about when they launch a website, with more time and effort being spent on getting the design and the content right. Often it is only later on, when they don’t see a good ranking in the search engines or a flood of visitors, that they start thinking about Keyword Research and SEO.

Keyword research is the first stage in any search engine optimization campaign, ideally done before you have even got to the website design stage. If you are thinking about keywords retrospectively as a result of a poorly performing website, don’t worry - it is still possible to do your keyword research now and go back and update your poorly performing web pages.

There are many tools and methods available for doing keyword research, but the best keyword research tool is Wordtracker. Wordtracker is the industry’s leading keyword research tool and has a massive database containing over 330 million search terms. It can let you know with a few clicks of your mouse what the most popular keyword phrases in your niche are, along with the number of competing websites and the number of searches per day for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Altavista, Ask and AllTheWeb.

 The easiest way to use Wordtracker is to use the Universal Search option. Type in your keywords and use the Thesaurus to find related phrases and synonyms, then click on the words that are interesting to you and simply add these to your “basket”. You can also click on the dig icon to find all phrases that contain that phrase. Once you have built up a list of at least 1000 keywords, choose step 3 and select a “Competition Search”. Within seconds you’ll then be given a report of the number of searches per day for each keyword and the number of competing webpages. This will really help you to narrow down on the right keyword phrase for your website.

In my next post I’ll be talking a little more about how to choose the right keyword phrase from your list and how to use the KEI to help you.