Basics of Keyword Properties

Keywords are the words or phrases that people use in search engines to search for the products or services. They have great importance in Internet Marketing and especially in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns since its using these keywords that one has to optimize her website so that it would appear in the first few pages of a search engine thereby increasing the possibility of getting noticed by the potential customers.

Finding the right keywords for the purpose of using it for SEO purposes is a very important step in Internet Marketing. It involves the understanding of various keyword properties like

• Popularity
• Competition
  
• Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)
  
• Keyword Effectiveness Rank (KER)

Popularity

Popularity of a keyword is the number of times a particular keyword was used by users in Search engines for a particular period of time. This is mainly found out by using online tools like Wordtracker, Overture etc. that keeps record of the number of times a keyword was used in various search engines.

Competition

Competition of a keyword is the number of websites that are optimized for a particular keyword. This is the number of results that a particular search engines shows for a given keyword.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)

An understanding of keyword effectiveness index is a very important factor in SEO. It compares the popularity of a keyword with its competition to find out which keywords are most effective for the SEO campaigns. KEI was invented by the Search Engine Positioning expert Sumantra Roy. KEI is mathematically found out using the below mentioned formula

Keyword Effectiveness Index = (Popularity)² / Competition

KEI = (P)² / C

This apparently means that when the popularity of a keyword increases its effectiveness also increases and vice versa. It is also quite obvious from the formula that when the competition increases the effectiveness of the keyword decreases and vice versa.The most important function of an SEO campaigns is therefore the identification of keywords with higher KEI and optimize the website with this high KEI keyword.

But some argue that KEI is not a perfect measure of effectiveness of a keyword. They say that the main problem with KEI is that it assume that the strength of competition of a website in the 100000^th place is same as that of a website in the 10^th place, which is actually not correct. The competitive strength of a website in the 10^th place is certainly more than the website on the 100000^th. Another measure with the name Keyword Effectiveness Rank (KER) has been introduced to overcome this issue.

Keyword Effectiveness Rank (KER)

The real value of a keyword in relation to a particular website can be effectively found out by comparing it with the average popularity and average competition of the chosen keywords. The result is normally showed in percentage. A keyword with a KER of 100% is an average keyword and a keyword with a KER of 500% is a very good keyword. KER is still in the developmental phase and the inventors hope to establish this concept pretty soon.

Optimizing the website with the right keywords alone doesn’t make sense and it should be done together with other on-page and off-page SEO methods. But keyword optimizing is a very important step in SEO campaigns that involves a lot of analysis also.