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 After you have defined your strategic keywords and keyphrases, it's time to start your preliminary keyword research. Ideally, this step should forestall domain name selection, copywriting and content compilation, so that you can create content with the exact keywords for each page already in mind, and then form your domain name and file names based on this initial keyword research. The aim of the preliminary research is to assemble a core base of keywords with the highest potential, so you can use this material when selecting the domain name and creating the file structure for your website. More importantly, this research creates a basket of keywords which form the basis for a latter stage of advanced investigation where you will need to pick out the keywords to actually use in optimization.
As a result of this step, a list of keywords is expected which contain from 5 to 20 keyword suggestions for EACH of your Web pages. The preliminary research consists in getting keyword suggestions and evaluating each keyword against two basic parameters, Competition and Daily World Searches, thus selecting the optimal keywords. You can get keyword suggestions by using one of the many free and paid tools and web-based services, as well as by extracting them manually from the top-ranked pages. In any case, you start with one strategic keyword or keyphrase and get many. Concerning the free tools/services, you might check out www.goodkeywords.com or Overture keyword suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). Among the most popular paid tools we could mention is WordTracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/). It's also a good idea to see how and on which keywords your competitors position themselves. Go to a search engine, like, Google, and type your starting strategic keyword in the search box. It will show up with the list of results. Open the first ten results in your browser, right-click somewhere on the page and select "View HTML (page) source" (this menu item may slightly vary depending on the browser you use) Now look for the keywords Meta tag (this where you will every search term they are targeting): <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="term 1, term 2, term 3 ... "> This should be in the first few lines of the page source. If you don't see it then ignore this page, go back to the search results and pull up the source of the second page in the list. In the Content section of this tag you will see all search terms and keywords that this page is targeting. Actually, this may make an addition to your own list of keyword suggestions. As you remember, after obtaining a list of keyword suggestion, you need to evaluate each of them against two parameters: Competition and Daily World Searches. Competition. Most SEO tutorials will tell you that "Competition", or "Supply", refers to how many sites are given out by the search engine for a certain search term. For instance, if you open Google, type "digital camera", and it finds 38,300,000 results. 38,300,000 will be your "competition", the theory goes, because your site must outplay them all to appear in the first 10 results.  Sean Burns, the author of "Rankings Revealed" (www.webmastersreference.com) has another point of view. He thinks you actually have to outperform only 10 sites (the current top-ranked ones) to achieve the desired result. Here are his words: Basically, the number of competing pages is something that you should try to ignore. I can tell you how many competing pages there are for any keyword without even doing a search - 10. Your goal is to get in the top 10 for each and every keyword you target so that is the only "supply" figure that you need to focus on.
If you do a search on Google for "Free Marketing Newsletter" you'll see that my WebmastersReference.com newsletter is in the top 10 - out of over 6 million pages. That may seem impressive but the fact is that no-one else is actually targeting that phrase. The 6 million listings is made up of pages that have Free, Marketing and Newsletter somewhere on the page.
If no-one is optimizing for a phrase it really doesn't matter how many competing pages there are.
We cannot agree with Sean on this point, here's why. Actually, when someone searches for "Free Marketing Newsletter", the search engine mechanism finds 6 million pages. It has to deal with them all and rank them all according to relevance, however optimized or not they are. Among them there might be powerful resources for webmasters or marketers. Although these are not optimized for "Free Marketing Newsletter", they WILL stand on your way because they are full of relevant content and the search engine considers them important, therefore they've got high rankings. Nevertheless, Mr. Burns further agrees (along with many) on the point that your actual competition is generally made by all sites which are optimized (intentionally or not) for your strategic keyphrase. For the moment, we will consider the "supply" our raw Competition figure, as it will do for our preliminary research. Later, in the course of the advanced investigation, we will refer to many other parameters. The second parameter to focus on is how often a particular keyphrase is actually being used by people in their search queries. We do not want to optimize for words and phrases which are of no popularity among the surfers - do we? So let's pay attention to the parameter called "Daily World Searches". Daily World Searches. It is virtually impossible to count how many times people search the Web daily for "ice cream" or "stock quotes". Most search engines keep this information secret for commercial reasons. However, some search machines, especially Meta-search engines, offer you the so called "live searches" statistics, i.e. they tell you how often a word has been searched on the engine during a specific period of time. The mostt trustworthy suppliers of the "live searches" data are metaspy (www.metaspy.com), kanoodle (www.kanoodle.com), lycos (www.lycos.com), and entireweb (www.entireweb.com). Additionally, Overture (www.overture.com), one of the most popular and powerful commercialized search engines, has its own keyword suggestion tool with monthly searches indication. The Keyword Suggestion Tool of some softwares the we will use processes the information obtained from a total 19 sources. It then approximates the total number of world searches for the given search phrase made on all search engines of the planet, including Google (although the source data is not obtained from Google directly, of course). Daily World Searches is a very useful piece of information: the higher this index, the more visitors this keyword will refer to us if we optimize for it. Keyword Effectiveness Index. Actually, this isn't as monstrous as it sounds. Developed by SEO expert Sumantra Roy (the author of LinkExplore software, www.linkexplore.com), it crowns the preliminary research by combining the data about Competition and Daily World Searches. The formula for KEI is KEI = (DS^2/C) = (DS/C * DS), where DS is the number of daily world searches and C is the competition. The KEI ranges from 0 to over 400. - 0-10 - Poor keyword
- 10-100 - Good Keyword
- 100-400+ - Excellent Keyword
So, the actual aim of our preliminary research is to obtain a list of keyword suggestions based on our initial strategic keywords and then determine the “KEI” for each of them. The higher the KEI, the more traffic this keyword will theoretically have, since the competition is low and the daily searches number is high. With the KEI, we will select from the best five to twenty suggestions for each our page.
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