I decided that before I blindly ran off trying to drive traffic from here, there and everywhere it would be a good idea to do a little keyword research first. Afterall this is a long term plan, so knowing which keywords I want to rank well with, and that I have a chance at ranking well with, will help me with my overall traffic strategy.

I’ve done a fair bit of SEO and keyword research before as a few years ago I set up my own dating website (www.phlirtz.com) and spent a lot of time trying to get the site up in the search engine rankings.

So I started off today with this great bit of software called Market Samurai (http://www.marketsamurai.com/). I was originally using it for adwords campaigns, but its good for general keyword research too. For the full version you have to pay, but the keyword research tool works great with the free version.

Basically, you enter a generic keyword phrase, I used ‘Internet Marketing’ and it goes out to find all the keywords it can, using Googles synonym tool. It can also use SEO digger to generate keywords but this is a paid service so you would have to be a member of SEO digger for that option to work.

This generated 103 keywords for me. I then went to google’s keyword tool and used the option to get keyword ideas using a website’s content. Now seeing as I am trying to get keyword idea for my blog, I thought it would be a good idea to see which keywords google thinks are appropriate to the top blogs that Alex showed us in module 4. So I took 2 of the top blogs in that list and plugged them in. Google came back with a load of keywords that it thought these blogs were about.

I plugged these in to Market Samurai as well. The good thing about doing this is that Market Samurai automatically ignores any duplicates. This bumped my keyword list up to 276.

The next step was to use Market Samurai to analyse these keywords. So pressing the ‘Analyse Keywords’ button gives me a few options to choose. I want to know how many people are searching on these terms and how much competition for them is out there. There is also an option for it to estimate how much adwords traffic you should get with them, it’s up to you if you want to check this, if you’re running any paid traffic campaigns it might be worth it. I also checked the SEO Comp option. Usually the only way to gauge the competition for keywords would be to count the search results returned by google for that keyword phrase. Market Samurai uses a different algorithm to gauge the quality of the sites you are competing against as well. For example, if wikipedia.org or amazon.com are ranking highly for certain keywords, then you are unlikely to ever be able to compete with these and Market Samurai takes this in to account.

Once you have all this data, you can then use something called Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) to determine which keywords are going to be worth targeting. KEI is worked out with this formula:

Searches * Searches / Number of Results.

I worked out the KEI using the the SEO Comp number from Market Samurai as the ‘Results’ parameter, which should be a more accurate reading.

This should give you an idea of which keywords people are searching on in this niche, but that don’t have overwhelming competition for them. The higher the KEI the better. Some keywords I would ignore as they are too broad to be worth competing on at the moment. And some will be out of context. But some of the more specific, high KEI keywords will be handy to know for using in blog titles, anchor text for incoming links, headings, phrases to use in your blog posts etc etc.

And if you can’t be bothered to go through all this yourself, you can download the data I came up with here.

I have hardly touched on the surface of Market Samurai but it looks like a very impressive bit of software for creating traffic friendly websites, and it’s still only in beta! I will probably upgrade to the full version when I have time to sit down and make proper use of it.