I use wordtracker.com to find my keywords. It is a great program and very helpful.

As for where to put the keywords… they should be within your website’s text. You should be writing content around these keywords. Using the headings as well as that is really important and helps quite a bit. To answer your questions… b,c,d are the most important places.

Hope that helps.

Thanks

Steve

To begin with KEI = (number searches) / (number competing web pages), as an earlier post noted. Consequently, the higher the KEI, the more attractive the keywords. However, there are some things you need to be aware of before you start basing your optimisation strategy by KEI.

1) You need to optimise for keywords which are both frequent used AND have a high KEI. For example, a keyword which has 1000 searches per month and 1000 competing webpages will have a lower KEI than one with 2 searches per month and 1 competing webpage. However, what is the use of a keyword that has only 2 searches per month? Taken to extremes, if a keyword has 1 search per year, but no competing web pages, the KEI is infinite (1 divided by zero is infinity). However, such a keyword is not worth spending any time on.

2) This is a purely mathematical calculation and doesn’t take into account all the subtle considerations. For example, a keyword may have a low KEI because there are a lot of competing sites, but of the competing sites are of low quality (e.g. all PageRank 1) then it will be very easy to get above them in search positions. In such a case, even though it has a low KEI, the cost of becoming top in the search engines is low, so it is worth it.

3) Alternatively, a keyword may have a high KEI because there are few competing sites. However, if among these few there are 20 high quality sites (e.g. Page Rank 5, with large corporate bank accounts), you may need to spend a huge amount of time and money to get into the top 20 search results. In this case, even though there is a high KEI, it isn’t worth it.

4) Somewhat more complicated is the fact that although a low KEI with 20000 hits per month will cost more per hit than a high KEI with 5000 hits per month, if you need to focus on one keyword, it may be worth-while to go for the low KEI provided the cost of the extra 15000 hits is more than compensated for by the existing business.

I could go on. However, to get to the bottom line, KEI should be used not to choose your keywords, but rather to identify your short-list. Once this is done, one must consider the strength of the competition, the search volume, and the incremental cost versus incremental value, in order to make the final decision.

Hope this helps. If I wrote 20 pages I could explain better and in more detail, but I don’t think such a long post would be welcome.

The KEI compares the 24Hour result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our database) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.