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.