Continuing with our look at Word Tracker’s “Keyword Basics” we’ll examine how to choose our best keywords from the many that can be generated using Wordtracker. Your online business blueprint will be incomplete if it does not account for the keywords that will drive potential customers to your website. Keywords drive everything from website traffic to product development to copywriting. That’s why it’s essential to understand how to choose your best keywords and find the best tools for doing so.

If you haven’t signed up for your free trial of Word Tracker, I recommend that you do so as you will better understand this series of tutorials as well as get a better understanding of keyword research. You can sign up for your free trial by clicking here.

In the previous lesson, The Keyword Matrix, we developed two spreadsheets for chocolate and related terms. The spreadsheets gave a prediction of the daily searches for each term. The predict figure is the first metric you should look at. High scoring keywords will be the most popular words in your marketplace – the words people use when they’re searching for your products – so “gifts” for a luxury chocolate site, “cheap flights” for a travel site.

But of course there is a problem. Because the keywords are so popular, lots of sites will use them. You will face a lot of competition and much of that competition will be good at search engine optimization.

There are three strategies you should follow:

1. Include the most popular keywords in your website copy, even though you may not rank well for them. Your customers will expect to see these keywords, and search engines will take note of them. By including them, you lay a foundation for the long term: slowly but surely as you add more content, your rankings will rise.

2. Use the most popular keywords along with qualifiers, either geographic or sector specific. So while it might be difficult to rank well for “chocolate gifts”, it is not such a challenge to rank well for “chocolate gifts Buffalo” targeting a geographic area or “corporate chocolate gifts” targeting the business sector.

3. Look for niche keywords or markets that others haven’t yet found. Such keywords have the magic combination of being relatively popular searches, but having little competition. Wordtracker provides a measurement for this – KEI or keyword effectiveness index.

Wordtracker provides you with a number of metrics to help in these strategies. You can find more details by clicking here.