Selection of keywords is the primary task and usually core of a search engine placement project. One has to be extremely cautious in selecting keywords as typical search engine placement task takes months to show result.

So, after spending good amount of money and time if the web-site is found to be well-placed in search engines but under wrong keywords - all money and effort go down the drain as the web-site may not be able to attract quality customers in sufficient numbers. In extreme cases, the placement project may have to be started all over again.

There may be many words (and phrases) that can describe a product - but can all of them qualify as keywords ? Are some words more important than others ? What is the essential quality of a keyword ?

The answer to above lies in popular use of a word in search engines. How many web surfers are actually using this word to search for a given product ? More people use a particular word in search engines to look for given product - better is the potential of the said word to be used as 'keyword' for that product.

So, the first and foremost quality of a keyword/keyphrase is quantum of its use in search engines. Now, how do we measure it ? There must be some analytical tool to compare popularity of each potential keyword. Let us examine this through an example.

For a web-site on garments - there may be many genenral keywords like garments, apparel, dresses, clothing, outfits, attire etc. as well as specific ones like trouser, blouse, skirts, saree, salwar kameej etc. In addition, one may have to consider key phrases like ladies dresses, ethnic garments, baby clothing, fashion garments etc.

Now, how to check comparative popularity of these possible keywords and key phrases ?

Fortunately, there are few organizations that track usage of keywords in search engines. Two well known among them are

• Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
  Free service from overture.com - its a decent tool for researching keyword phrases. It indicates which phrases had the highest numbers of searches on Overture during the previous month. The biggest weakness it has, as far as applying it to the natural search engines, is that Overture counts singular and plural as the same and also corrects misspelling so the totals are all lumped together in this tool whereas on the natural engines they are considered differently.



• WordTracker
  WordTracker - a paid service, is very similar to Overture's except that this tool differentiates between plural and singular searches, does not correct spelling (i.e. it gives the number of searches for misspellings rather than correcting them and giving a total for correct and misspelled words) and gives the results in predicted numbers of searches over all the engines per day rather than just one engine over a month. A good review of Wrodtracker can be found Here

Coming back to our example of garment exporter's web-site - let's see usage of few potential keywords and keyphrases during October 2005 in Overture search engine

Example 1

Keyword	Usage
garments	13,165
apparel	1,27,783
woman apparel	1,65,455
womens apparel	2,06,299
discount apparel	2,50,376
man apparel	46,454
american apparel	32,391
sports apparel	13,969
golf apparel	9275
baby apparel	8513
kid apparel	7872
riding apparel	7317

Example 2

Keyword	Usage
skirt	1,26,002
short skirt	1,10,107
mini skirt	1,04,976
skirt up	36,906
womens skirt	18,434
tight skirt	17,066
sexy skirt	12,373
leather skirt	12,148
denim skirt	10,133

Above examples reveal some very interesting observations on popular usage of search words:

• Some keywords are more popular than others. For example, 'apparel' as a keyword is 10 times more popular than 'garments'



• Keyphrases are more popular than keywords in many cases. For every use of the keyword 'apparel' the keyphrase 'discount apparel' was used twice ! Sum of the use of keyphrases 'woman apparel' and 'womens apparel' was three times more than the keyword 'Apparel'



• Popularity of key phrase can even be seen in specific keywords like 'skirt'. The key phrases 'short skirt' and 'mini skirt' together account for nearly twice more usage than a specific keyword like 'skirt'

So, which keywords to pick for your web-site ? Should we select most popular keywords only ? Unfortunately, its not as simple as that !

There's something called competition ! More popular a keyword, greater will be the competition among web-sites. As only a few can achieve top ranking - competition will be fierce for most popular keywords. One has to weigh one's strength while picking a keyword. What is needed is a prioritization of potential keywords based on one's own strength and product mix and then promoting a few chosen keywords. We shall discuss specific strategy for prioritizing potential keywords and choosing right ones in next issue.