Wordtracker is one of the most popular keyword assessment tools on the Web. Nearly everybody who optimizes has used Wordtracker at least once.
This interactive gadget looks at your keywords, shows related keywords, and
displays a table displaying the relative popularity of keywords. This much tech-nology brought to bear on simple keywords might seem like overkill, but key-words are too important to treat casually. In addition to choosing keykey-words (which, by itself, is not necessarily easy), you should assess their competitive value — and that’s exactly what Wordtracker does.
Evaluating keywords means assessing two factors: popularity, or the fre-quency with which they appear, and competition,or the number of sites using them. (By “using them,” I mean using the keywords in any fashion and any context, not just in the site’s metatags.)
Wordtracker covers both bases by suggesting keywords related to your core terms and by evaluating the suggested keywords you select. (In Wordtracker, a keywordmeans either a word or a phrase.) Wordtracker is a paid service, charging by the day, the week, the month, a 3-month period, or a year. You can concentrate your keyword research into a 1-day or 7-day blitz, without committing to an ongoing subscription.
Wordtracker offers a free trial of 15 keyword suggestions, using just one search engine (Alta Vista as of this writing) instead of the multiple search engines that paying customers get. The free trial is a good opportunity to walk through Wordtracker’s screens and tools. Start here:
www.wordtracker.com
Click the icon for the free trial and surf through whatever opening screens Wordtracker throws at you before getting down to business. The Wordtracker process comprises four steps:
Enter keywords.On the Step 1 page, enter one or more keywords. Keep your list short for now. One word works well because it gives Wordtracker a relatively open field to find related words. As you can see in Figure 4-1, you can opt in and out of two settings: Lateral and Thesaurus. I find the Lateral search more helpful because it investigates hundreds of Web pages related to the keyword topic. The Thesaurus just finds synonyms, which doesn’t turn up much with new terms such as mp3. You may choose both types of search, but because the free trial delivers trun-cated results, I’d stick with Lateral. Click the Proceed button.
Select keywords.Step 2 displays a preliminary list of related keywords, with your original at the top. Click a keyword for more detail. When you do, the right side of the screen displays a table containing the selected word and a list of related words. (See Figure 4-2.) On this screen, any clicked keyword from the left-hand list is added to a basket in which Wordtracker performs its keyword analysis and comparison in Step 4.
Try the shovel icons; they dig into the corresponding keyword and find related words to it.(Clicking the shovel icon next to your original key-word merely replicates Step 1, so try the shovel icon next to a different word.) The number in the Count column indicates the number of times that keyword appears in Wordtracker’s index. The Predict column is Wordtracker’s estimate of search queries for that keyword in major search engines over the next 60 days. (Click the Predict link to see which engines are currently represented.) When you’re finished, click the arrow icon for Step 3.
Export or e-mail your keywords.Wordtracker creates a tab-delimited text file of your selected keywords and an e-mail link (both in the paid version). In the trial version, simply move through this step by clicking the Step 4: Competition link.
View your competition results.If you select all 15 keywords in Step 2, this step takes a minute to load. What you finally see is a table listing your keywords and their total instances in Wordtracker’s index, this time ranked by the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), as shown in Figure 4-3.
Figure 4-1:
Entering a keyword in Word-tracker.
Figure 4-3:
Measure of the potential marketabil-ity of your words.
Figure 4-2:
Word-tracker displays related keywords and their popularity.
KEI is a measure of each keyword’s competitive power and is constructed from two other statistics: the keyword’s count(frequency of appearance) and its breadth(the number of sites containing it). The idea here is that by comparing a keyword’s frequency with its prevalence, you can gauge its effectiveness. When a high count is concentrated in only a few sites, there’s less competition among sites optimizing for that word than there could be. Conversely, when a lower count is distributed among a large number of sites, competition is fierce among sites optimizing for a rela-tively unpopular word. Broadly speaking, it makes more sense to opti-mize your site for the first scenario than for the second.
Don’t use KEI as a rote tool, obeying it mindlessly. As you see in Figure 4-3, KEI gives the highest rank to stacy’s mom mp3.A large number of hits are con-centrated in 25 pages — possibly on a single site belonging to Stacy or her mom. (Actually, a quick Google search reveals that Stacy’s Mom is a music group.)
Note the high KEI of metal mp3,which might inspire an imaginative entrepre-neur to test the waters with a page devoted to that music genre. Note also that mp3scores much higher than mp3s,suggesting that a site optimized for MP3 music topics should concentrate on the singular keyword, because the plural is relatively unpopular and spread among many sites.
Read on to discover a free means of comparing the popularity of keywords as search terms.