Keyword Efficiency is Critical

The web seethes like a boiling cauldron. Billions of pages constantly compete for the attention of billions of people. Content appears and disappears faster and faster. It can present an intimidating prospect, at first.

There's another side to all this furious activity, though. Billions of pages of content means enormous variation in quality and effectiveness. This variation creates openings which we can exploit with the right strategies.

Naturally, the most effective way to gain attention is to create content that:

• as many people as possible are looking for
• has as little competition as possible.

One can create content about a particular topic in any number of ways. Usually that number is too big to measure. We'll assume that we are free to examine many different keywords relating to a subject in order to find the ones that will work the best. This implies a flexible attitude. We must be willing to listen to our prospective audience and let their expressions of interest shape our content.

The Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI) for a particular query is defined as

KEI = Search Traffic² / Competition

High traffic isn't enough – a popular search term could be dominated by websites that are too strong and too expensive to compete with.

Low competition isn't enough – it could just indicate that nobody's interested.

You need to have both factors working for you.

Selecting keywords at random would be like drilling for oil at random. You're just as likely to succeed in both cases. Identifying good keywords requires:

• a large set of candidate keywords to choose from (for a particular topic)
• an efficient process to sift through those candidates to identify the winners.

There is more than one way to do this, but we'll focus on methods that use freely available tools.

Step 1 – Finding the Candidates

The Google Keyword Tool is a free service linked to Google's AdWords pay-per-click advertising system. Its default mode will generate up to 100 keyword alternatives relating to a particular subject – after you fill in a captcha to prove that you're human, and not a bot.

With an AdWords account you can create up to 800 alternatives without dealing with a captcha. Relax, you don't actually have to become a customer to open an account. And with a few simple tricks you can bypass the 800 keyword limit to create thousands of candidate keywords for the next step in the process. The bigger your net, the more fish you'll catch.

It all takes a bit of work, naturally, but good keywords will minimize the time, effort, and expense required to gain an audience. They increase your chances of success more than any other factor apart from the quality of your content.

We'll walk through the specific steps to create thousands of candidate keywords next.

 

 

Knowing how to do keyword research gives you a vital advantage when creating web content of any kind. A successful journey begins with a step in the right direction. This blog will focus on developing web traffic, primarily on:

• Attracting visitors
• Engaging them
• Converting them
• Bringing them back

Along with topics which support this theme.

Building traffic effectively begins with keyword research. Every day, keywords link billions of search engine queries with web content. Your aim should be to connect people's interests to your objectives as efficiently as possible. You can choose from a selection of very good tools to this, including free tools.

 

What's a good keyword?

Google's dictionary definition:

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noun /ˈkēˌwərd/
keywords, plural

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Definition no. 4. associates best to web content development and traffic building. For the purposes of discussion a keyword can be a single word or a phrase. Any string typed in as a search query would qualify.

A good keyword:

• Draws as many interested visitors as possible to your content
• Is easy to rank for in search engine results because of low competition

Finding good keywords takes work, but the rewards make it fun as well as worthwhile. It's like panning for gold. Spotting a shiny nugget will make you forget about all the sifting that it took to find it.

Starting conditions will dominate your chances of success. Terrific content will benefit no-one if no-one sees it. The best way to be seen is to present the content that others are actively looking for. Good keywords provide you with the best starting conditions for your efforts.

 

What else is a good keyword?

It's useful to remember that keywords are not just strings of characters. They were created by people acting to resolve an unmet need. Simple curiousity perhaps. Maybe something more urgent and specific. A keyword gives a concrete snapshot of someone's mental state. When the same keyword is typed in more than once it reveals information about the mental state of a population.

A repeated keyword is less like a collection of notes and more like the sound of a choir. You know very little about the set of people who shared this common thought, but you know that they exist, and there will be more. Bearing that in mind helps you create more effective content.

The very first thing we need to work with is an idea, or a concept, something that can serve as the basis for research. We'll discuss procedures in greater detail next.