To get more traffic to your site through search engine optimization you must first find out the most popular keywords for searchers to use when they are looking for content or products such as yours. For each of these top keywords that is commonly used to search for products and information in a given topical niche, it is important to gauge 3 statistics: keyword popularity, convertibility and competition. Keyword Popularity is the amount of people that use a search engine to search for that term in a given time period. Shorter and more general terms are often the most popular keywords. These terms are also generally much more competitive than the more specific and lower traffic terms. Identifying the keywords that are most likely to turn into a sale is a matter of determining the keyword?s level of convertibility. Studies of search engines show that there are two types of searchers, information seekers and buyers, the keyword that the searcher used is a clue to their intention. Keywords that are more specific or include call to action words such as ?buy? or ?sale? result in more sales because a higher percentage of the people using those terms are interested in purchasing a product. Competition is a measure of the amount and quality of the other websites also optimized for a given keyword, the lower the competition for a keyword the easier it will be to rank high for it.

To begin building your list of keywords you should list all of the common sense keywords that you can think of that relate to your site's topic. Then you can use one of the three keyword suggestion tools that are available to expand your keyword list. The most popular keyword tools are Google's Adwords keyword tool, Overture's keyword suggestion tool or Wordtracker's keyword tools. The Google and Overture keyword tools are free but Wordtracker is a subscription based resource that offers the best statistics of the three keyword tools.

Keyword Popularity Research

Google currently controls roughly 70% of all searches done on the internet though its homepage and its various search result providers. For the benefit of its pay per click customers Google offers a keyword research tool, but does not release exact search term popularity statistics, this means that there is no way to know the exact numbers of searches for keywords on 70% of all searches, meaning that any exact numerical data on keyword popularity or traffic levels are at best statistically valid samples of the larger population. There are 2 companies that publish this exact information, Overture and Wordtracker.

Overture is a pay per click search ad serving agency that allows possible advertising buyers to check traffic statistics with a free online tool. The keywords and keyword popularity information that this tool displays are questionable because of the clumsy editing process the data is subjected to before it is released for public usage in Overture?s keyword research tool. Stems, word variations, misspellings and plurals are all combined into the singular root of the keyword, and in many instances this can be quite detrimental to your keyword research.

Wordtracker is a subscription based resource that is partnered with a meta search engine to deliver accurate traffic statistics through a powerful and easy to use web based interface, and since this was designed as an SEO tool the keywords and popularity data presented by this tool are the most accurate available. They also have a powerful and easy to use web based interface that makes it easy to organize and analyze large keyword research projects.

Keyword Convertibility

When an internet user is in the process of buying a product online and is using a search engine, he or she is in the later stages of the buying process. The user is most commonly researching products, deciding on a product out of a list of choices or finding a product to buy at the right price. Compared to non-spending information seeker users, the potential buyers are easily distinguishable by the keyword and key phrases they are using to search. Specific products, price ranges and action words are good indicators of a convertible keyword or phrase. User?s that are searching for specific products or product numbers have usually already done their preparative research and are further along in the buy process. Price range words, such as ?cheap?, ?affordable?, ?discount?, or ?wholesale?, indicate that the user has decided on a product to buy and is now looking for the best deal, show him the price he wants and you?ve made yourself a sale. Actions words are words that directly indicate the users? intention to buy a product. These keywords are generally the most convertible of the three examples given, and generally include terms such as ?buy?, ?purchase? and ?for sale?.

These searches tend to be lower in traffic volume than the more general terms so a common mistake is to eschew these keywords for more popular general terms, but this is certainly a mistake. Even though these keywords will generate less overall traffic, they will often result in more sales than more general keywords making them more valuable. A useful way to find very valuable keywords is by checking the highest pay per click bid for the keyword in one of the larger pay per click bidding systems. There are bid price statistics tools on the web that allow you to check the bids of a list of keywords, Wordtracker is the best keyword research tool because it integrates the bid data into your keyword research reports.

Keyword Competition Research

When launching a search engine optimization marketing campaign, either through organic search result optimization or via pay per click search advertising, it pays to know which keywords are over saturated with marketers and vendors. When there are a high number of advertisers bidding on a particular keyword the price per click for traffic from that keyword will raise, its simple supply and demand. Higher spending on traffic results in a lower return on investment, conversely, by finding popular and convertible keywords that are under-developed an advertiser can pay much less per click for the traffic. Organic search results work in much the same way but with less of a directly proportional competition to investment ratio because the investments needed to obtain high rankings over intense competition is often not just capital, but knowledge and time. In fact often very little capital is require to secure very valuable organic rankings, but as with PPC competition, the fewer your direct competitors for a given keyword the higher your return on investment will be for efforts expended to rank for that term.

There are a few ways to gauge competition statistics for a set of keywords. The most common way is to perform an exact search on the search engine you are targeting, usually Google. By placing the key phrase in quotes you can see how many pages in that search engine?s index contain exact matches of that phrase, allowing you to gauge how many websites you are competing against for that keyword. Since the quantity of the competition is less important than the quality of the competition simply knowing how many pages contain the phrase can be misleading because it will overestimate the competition. You can search the large directories for exact matches of the keywords or phrases, the results that are given will be how many sites include the key phrase in their title, domain or description. This measurement errors on the side of underestimating the competition, as some sites will be targeting keywords that are not in their title, domain or description. The surest way to research how tough the competition will be for a specific keyword is to manually look at the search engine result page and check out the sites currently listed. If there are a lot of keywords in the titles and the pages have high pagerank you can be sure the competition is stiff. Wordtracker allows you to check the competition levels on exact matches at most large search engines and directories, and it includes the data into your existing keyword research report.

Incoming Log Analysis

After you have created a steady stream of traffic for your site from the search engines, you can use usage statistics software to view what search terms users were searching for when they found your site. This is ultimately the best keyword resource for real traffic and convertibility data. The logs will allow you to research keywords and key phrases that were never planned on when the site was built, an you can then further optimize for those keywords growing your keyword list and traffic.

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