Step 1: Open your text editor or word processor and write down all the words and phrases that you might have searched for if you were looking for a company which offers products and services similar to yours. For example, suppose your company organizes packaged tours to Australia. Here’s a list of phrases that I might have searched for if I were planning to make a trip to Australia:
Of course, the keywords that came to your mind may have been different. But that’s not important – the important thing is to get an initial list of keywords.
You may be wondering why I have not used single word keywords. Here’s why:
Firstly, single word keywords tend to be hyper-competitive. A search for “tourism” or “travelling” in any search engine will probably generate hundreds of thousands of pages. While it is possible that you may get your page in the top 10 for such a single word keyword, it is quite unlikely.
Secondly, because of the sheer number of pages that single word searches can throw up, most search engine users have realized that they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases rather than individual words. Statistical research has shown that most people are now searching for 2 or 3 word phrases rather than for single words.
Thirdly, single word keywords won’t get you targeted traffic. When people search for “tourism”, they are not necessarily looking for tourist destinations in Australia – they may be interested in any other country of the world. Even if you got your site into the top 10 for tourism, you gain nothing from such visitors. However, when someone searches for “tourism in Australia”, he/she is your potential customer, and hence, it makes sense for you to try and get a top ranking for your site for that keyword. Hence, whenever you are trying to generate keywords, try to be location specific. Try to think of keywords which apply to the geographic area that your product or service is designed to serve.
Step 2: Open any spreadsheet program that is installed in your hard drive. I assume you are using Microsoft Excel. If you are using some other spreadsheet program, just change the spreadsheet related procedures outlined here to fit your program.
Create 4 columns – one for the keyword, one for the popularity of the keyword, one for the number of sites that appear in AltaVista for that keyword and the last for something I call the Keyword Effectiveness Index (don’t worry – I’ll explain what KEI means later on). In order to ensure that you can follow what I am saying, I recommend that you add the following column headers to the first four columns of the first row of your spreadsheet:
Keyword
Popularity
No. of Competitors
KEI
In case you don’t want to take the trouble of creating your own spreadsheet, download the keywords.zip file from http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?4901&download.htm The file contains a sample spreadsheet in Excel 97 format.
Step 3: A great way to obtain a list of keywords related to the ones you have developed in the first step is to use WordTracker’s keyword generation service by going to http://the-easy-way.com/wordtracker.html Click on the “Trial” option at the top of the site. In the page that appears, type in your name and email address and click on the “Start the trial >>” button. In the next page, click on “Click here to start the trial”. In the next page, type in the first keyword that you developed in Step 1, i.e. “tourism in Australia”, in the text box. Click on the “Proceed >>” button.
Step 4: In the next page, WordTracker will display a list of keywords related to the keyword that you had typed in. (Just scroll down the left pane to see the keywords). Now, click on the first keyword in the left pane which is applicable for your site. In the right pane, WordTracker will show a list of keywords which contain the keyword you had clicked on in the left pane. Then in the table that you have created in your spreadsheet, copy each of the keywords in the right pane and paste them in the first column of the table. Also, copy the number of times those keywords have been used (i.e. the figure present in the Count column in WordTracker) and paste them in the second column. In order to ensure that you can follow me, make sure that you type the first keyword in the second row of your spreadsheet. Of course, you should only bother adding a keyword to your spreadsheet if it is applicable for your site.
Once you have added all the keywords in the right pane which are applicable for your site, click on the next keyword in the left pane which is applicable for your site. Once again, WordTracker will display a list of keywords in the right pane which contain the keyword you had clicked on in the left pane. Again, copy the keywords in the right pane which are applicable for your site and paste them in the first column of your spreadsheet. Also, copy the figures present in the Count column and paste them in the second column beside the corresponding keywords. Repeat this process for each of the keywords in the left pane.
