From: Nancy Wunderlin

Jill,

I just read your newsletter for the first time and I got enough info to keep me busy for weeks!

I am trying to use Wordtracker to find out what the best keywords are for our products. Can you give me some tips on using Wordtracker? I find their site hard to understand and not helpful.

For example, one of our software products creates tournament brackets for double elimination tournaments. According to WordTracker the phrase with the highest KEI is "printable blank tournament brackets." I find it hard to believe that's better than "tournament software." I must be doing something wrong. Thanks in advance for any tips you can offer.

Sincerely,

Nancy Wunderlin
Wunderlin Software, LLC

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Nancy,

You're correct. Most likely "tournament software" is the better keyword phrase to shoot for in your search engine optimization campaign.

The main thing that you're doing wrong is putting any stock into the KEI part of Wordtracker. Personally, I rarely bother to look at the competition reports because they don't give me much (if any) valuable information. When you don't know better, you might think that the competition report is telling you how many pages are actually optimized for a particular keyword phrase in any given engine. But they're not telling you this at all! All they can tell you is how many pages show up in a search for that particular keyword phrase.

This may seem like useful info, but it's misleading. You may see that there are 100,000 pages that show up when someone types in a particular search query, however, there may very well be only 4 or 5 of those pages that have been specifically optimized for that keyword phrase. The others may just happen to be using the phrase (or the words within it) somewhere on their page. Even a beginner SEO should be able to easily get ahead of those pages in the search engine results pages with some rudimentary optimization.

The whole KEI thing is supposed to make your optimization job easier by telling you which phrases will be a breeze to optimize for. However, you can't be afraid to optimize for the keyword phrases that are the most relevant to your products and services, regardless of KEI numbers. As long as you stay away from one-word keywords and some two-word keyword phrases that are used so frequently that they might as well be one word, then don't worry too much about the competition.

Personally, I recommend doing just steps 1 and 2 in Wordtracker and skipping the competition reports altogether. Don't look too closely at the numbers; just pay attention to the phrases and their relative position to each other in the list. Then take your keyword phrase list and choose the ones that make the most sense for your site. Pick two or three different keyword phrases for each page of your site and optimize the copy, Title tags and links accordingly.

I've written about KEI a few times in the past here: http://www.highrankings.com/issue028.htm#seo and here: http://www.highrankings.com/issue034.htm#seo5.