Choosing Keywords - The Truth About Kei

By Author: George Manty
Total Articles: 2
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Choosing Keywords - The Truth about KEI

Choosing keywords that will bring extra traffic to your website is something
that SEO experts are trained to do. There is a popular method of choosing
keywords that invloves the calculation of something called KEI (Keyword
Effectiveness Index). KEI was devised by Sumantra Roy, a Search Engine
Positioning specialist from http://www.1stSearchRanking.net. KEI is a very
helpful indicator, but in my opinion, it is slightly flawed.

The KEI is basically a comparison of the number of times a search term
is searched versus the number of search engine result pages that come up
for that keyword phrase.

For example, let's say that you are developing a widget website. You want to sell
lots of widgets. You do some research using *Overture's search term suggestion
tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). You find out
that the following terms are searched a lot:

widget, red widget, blue widget, green widget, yellow widget.

You then go to *Yahoo and type in the search ...
... terms to see how many websites show
up for each term and you come up with the following table:

keyword phrase = widget
# times searched = 10,000
# resulting pages = 1,000,000
KEI = 100

keyword phrase = red widget
# times searched = 9,000
# resulting pages = 950,000
KEI = 85.26

keyword phrase = blue widget
# times searched = 8,000
# resulting pages = 120,000
KEI = 533.33

keyword phrase = green widget
# times searched = 7,900
# resulting pages = 900,000
KEI = 69.34

keyword phrase = yellow widget
# times searched = 6,300
# resulting pages = 994,000
KEI = 39.93

According to the KEI ratio, the best keywords to choose are those with a high KEI
(ie. the most popular keywords, with the lowest competition). This is a basic
law of supply and demand. Based on the chart above you might think,

"Ah ha! I should target blue widgets because it has a high KEI ratio."

The problem with this is that you are making the assumption that a low quanity
of competition is more important than the quality of the competition. This is a
major FLAW. KEI does not factor in the QUALITY of competion only the quantity. I
have come up with a simple method for determining the quality of competition
using *Google *Page Rank (although a better solution could be created based on
backlinks of relevant sites).

This simple method is done by calculating the average Page Rank for the first n
resulting pages for a given keyword search (where n is the number of pages you
want to be ranked in). So turning back to the example above, let's say you want
to be in the top 10 (n=10) search engine ranking for blue widgets. Go to your
search engine of choice or use your tool of choice and type in blue widgets as
your keyword. Then check each page's PageRank in the top ten results. Divide
that number by 10. This calculates what I call the KPI (Keyword Page Rank Index).
The formula looks like this:

(P1+P2+..+PN)/N (where n is the number of pages you are adding)

In my example above, let's look at the new results:

keyword phrase = widget
# times searched = 10,000
# resulting pages = 1,000,000
KEI = 100
KPI = 7.5

keyword phrase = red widget
# times searched = 9,000
# resulting pages = 950,000
KEI = 85.26
KPI = 7.2

keyword phrase = blue widget
# times searched = 8,000
# resulting pages = 120,000
KEI = 533.33
KPI = 7.3

keyword phrase = green widget
# times searched = 7,900
# resulting pages = 900,000
KEI = 69.34
KPI = 4.2

keyword phrase = yellow widget
# times searched = 6,300
# resulting pages = 994,000
KEI = 39.93
KPI = 5

Based on the results above you can see that to make it into the top 10 search
engine results you will be competing with pages that have a *Page Rank averaging
7.3, which is a pretty high *Page Rank. On the other hand, if you choose green
widgets you will be competing against pages with an average *Page Rank of 4.2.
In this case, it would probably make more sense to target "green widgets".

Does this ever happen?
YES! It does. While finding keywords for my websites, I discovered this
discrepancy in the KEI. I thought about keeping it to myself, because it is
useful "inside" information. But now that I have a website dedicated to helping
beginners with website promotion, I decided I would go ahead and let the cat
out of the bag.

While this new method itself is flawed, it is not bad. Another important
calculation that I came up with is what I like to call "anchor backlink quality
indicator" (ABQI). To calculate it, you would have to check the backlinks of the
top ten websites for that keyword, and determine the number of times a backlink
uses the keyword in it's anchor text. This will give you a good idea of how many
backlinks to the page you will need ot be competitive for that given keyword
phrase.

One last factor that would be nice to know is the Relevancy of the websites
pointing to the top ten pages for the given keyword. In other words, how many
relevant pages point to the top ten pages for the given keyword. This could also
help in determining the quality of the competiton.

Ultimately, what should happen is the search engines should develop a keyword
suggestion tool that gives a competition indicator that uses all of their secret
factors to show us SEOs what are the best words for us to target. SEO experts
would pay lot's of money for this tool and the Search Engines could make a
pretty penny by providing us with a tool like this. Are you listening *Yahoo,
*Google, MSN, anyone?

In conclusion, taking Page Rank into account will help improve your keyword
research over KEI. KEI is still valuable, but using it in conjunction with KPI
will help greatly in your search for good keywords.

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Notes:
This example is totally fictional. The numbers given in these examples are
fictional.

* Google and Page Rank are trademarks of Google Inc.
* Yahoo is a trademark of Yahoo Inc.
* Overture is a trademark of Overture Inc.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Choosing Keywords - The Truth about KEI
Written by George Manty, owner of http://websitepromotionbook.com
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is included along with a link to http://websitepromotionbook.com