Taking charge of website keywords

Website keywords: your key to website optimization.

by Arlene Prunkl, freelance editor

WordTracker's Key Research Guide
Download a free 75-page Key Research Guide that explains how to optimize your website's key words to get maximum traffic from the search engines.

Wordtracker.com is an online keyword database and search tool of over 300 million keywords and key phrases culled from top search engine metacrawlers Metacrawler.com and Dogpile.com. It compares your keywords and phrases with those in its database and returns a list of the top matches from a vast selection of recently used "real" search terms. Buried behind a relatively user-friendly, logical interface, Wordtracker's metrics find and analyze more related words and synonyms for your keywords than you could ever brainstorm. You're provided not only with actual recent and predicted demand for these keywords, but also a breakdown of how many other websites are competing for the same words and phrases.

One of Wordtracker's highly touted features is the "KEI Analysis" (Keyword Effectiveness Index), a supply and demand calculation that returns the most current, hottest keywords, and compares them with how often they are used and by how many other sites. It claims to run its analysis against the biggest search engines, directories, and pay-per-click engines to provide you with the most profitable keywords. According to my website designer and optimization expert, Penny Weaver (Web-Weaver-Marketing.com), however, that measurement is not entirely effective because some of the web pages Wordtracker uses for comparison are not properly optimized to begin with. She says: "Many of the pages that Wordtracker takes into account as competition are not optimized very well, so it is not necessarily a good measure of the competition. They might just have the keyword once in their meta tags or elsewhere."

The people at Wordtracker, a UK group, seem honestly to care about their customers. Among other features designed for ease of use, Wordtracker offers a free trial that, although limited, illustrates clearly the potential of the paid version. After you've entered a word or phrase that best summarizes your website, Wordtracker generates a "lateral" search, and a list of 15 related keywords appears on the right of your screen, along with the number of times that term was searched during the past 60 days. (Updated once a day, the paid version returns the top 1,000 terms from the past two months and 36 hours.) Add these terms to your personal "basket" by clicking on them. Any of these terms that are particularly relevant to your site can be further explored using a "dig" option, causing near exponential growth of your original word. Once your keyword basket is full, you go on to check the number of competing sites in all the major search engines (the trial version is limited to Altavista), and the resulting list is e-mailed to you with detailed information on how to choose your most effective, profitable keywords.

Wordtracker allows you to create and manage many projects for different websites or pages, and store your data separately for each. You can add as many words as you like to your project baskets, thousands if necessary. A thesaurus feature also helps if you need inspiration for alternative initial keyword choices. Wordtracker is particularly useful for seeing results from singular, plural, upper and lowercased words, where other search engines combine these or don't differentiate. And finally, Wordtracker will search on common misspellings—a great tool if you want bargain clicks in pay-per-click marketing.

A home-based entrepreneur's most valuable resource is time. Wordtracker is a remarkably useful tool that takes the guesswork and arbitrary brainstorming out of keyword research—and ultimately saves you precious time to devote to the rest of your business development. Prices are reasonable and you can subscribe for a day, a week, a month, or prepay for up to a year. Wordtracker also offers an affiliate program.