Many webmasters start off their SEO campaigns with link building, acquiring links from directories, article directories, and other websites. The flaw with this approach is – it is like building walls and floors without a proper foundation.
For starters, “Keyword Research” is the process of identifying the keywords for which one should optimize the website. A vast majority of the marketers go by instinct, or choose relevant keywords at random.  Now what’s wrong with this?

1.    First mistake is with the number of keywords chosen. Choose a limited number of keywords to promote your webpage.  The smaller your keyword list is, the more focused (and hence stronger) will be your SEO efforts. A lot of marketers choose a big list of keywords – like 15+ keywords for a page which is bound to fail in most cases. It is advisable to keep the number of keywords to about 5 – 10.

2.    Choose the keywords than can bring in traffic. What is the point in optimizing your site for keywords that can’t bring in traffic? For example, let us assume that you optimize your site for keyword “cancer treatment” for a website on which you provide information on cancer. However, your customers actually search for “cancer therapy”, then you probably don’t get visitors!

Again, choosing highly competitive keywords won’t help. For example, there are hundreds of websites including big players like Amazon, NewEgg etc trying to sell iPhones online and they’re competing for the keyword “buy iphone”. Well competing with the big-shots would be expensive and wouldn’t yield much fruit. It is wiser to go for moderately competitive keywords. Here, I’d like to bring a term I discussed in my earlier post : KEI – Keyword Effectiveness Index. KEI is a measure of the attractiveness of a keyword. Higher the KEI, more attractive is the keyword to optimize. KEI is essentially the ratio of number of searches on the keyword per month to the number of search results on Google (assumed to be the competition).

KEI’s effectiveness in measuring the effectiveness of a keyword is debatable – I’ll discuss that in one of my later posts.

3.    Finally, the selling potential of the keywords. If your goal is to simply drive traffic to your website, then this isn’t applicable. But if you’re trying to sell something, or get registrations this is an important factor. Let us assume that you’re trying to sell iPhones. But if you promote using keywords like “free iphone” you will get traffic (visitors) but the visitors wouldn’t really buy on your website – because they’re looking for a free iPhone! This case is pretty obvious, but may not be the same always. Tracking CPC (cost per conversion) is essential.

Whether you put your efforts on link building & other aspects of SEO or not – Keyword Research must be done!

Different people use different definitions for SEM. Some think, SEO is a branch of SEM while others believe that SEO & SEM are exclusive. According to this definition, SEO is aimed at organic search results while SEM is about paid search results. But yeah, whats in the name.. For this discussion we’ll assume that SEO & SEM are exclusive so that we don’t mix them up.

SEO & SEM strategies are very much dependent on each other. Some might claim that “Google says organic & paid results are totally independent”. Ofcourse, I agree. But when you talk about strategy they need to go together.

I’ll explain how. SEM is a blessing in disguise for SEO efforts. It takes SEO, weeks if not months to deliver results. Generally, a SEO campaign is started by figuring out the keywords to target, based on the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index). KEI is a rough measure of competition for a keyword. Higher the competition, lower is the KEI. For a keyword like “newyork flowers” the KEI would be low since the competition is pretty high. Now, what this means is – targetting such a keyword isn’t good as it is difficult to get on top of the competition.

Now, the good thing about KEI is that it can be calculated instantly. The bad part is, KEI is a very bad indicator of the commercial effectivess of a keyword. For example, a keyword like “free hosting” may not lead to too many sales though it might have a high KEI. So, eventually you want to sell stuff online – not simply get “window-shoppers”! In this case it is obvious that someone searching for “free hosting” has less probability of buying webspace. It may not be so obvious in most cases. For example if you’re selling SEO services, someone searching for “easy SEO” or “SEO software” may not be too much interested in your services.

So, here the $-value of keywords gain importance than the KEI figures. the dollar-value is a measure of the selling capacity of a keyword. A keyword like “buy persian carpet” would have a higher $-value than “persian carpet”, as the user has explicitly has mentioned his desire to buy one. We’re just talking about probabilities here, and these needn’t be strictly true. One good thing about $-value of keywords is that it can be obtained quickly from SEM campaigns, as with high spends the numbers stabilize fast. The most effective SEO strategy would be to target those keywords with good KEI as well as $-value. Obviously keywords with high $-value would have high competition and hence low KEIs. Here lies the challenge in front of the marketer – finding the right keywords that balance both KEIs & $-values!