Analyzing Keywords Continuing on from Part One of 'So You Want to Start an Online Business'; we will be taking the list of keywords you have developed and further expand, eliminate and analyze each one. The end result will be a solid set of keywords and phrase that will greatly improve your chances of top placement on the search engines in your chosen market.

If you followed through with the exercises from Part One you should have a good solid list of keywords to work with. If you don't; please go back to Part One of this article and develop the keyword list first. Your list should consist of every possible relevant keyword for your market; including very general to very specific keywords.

So lets get down to the analyzing.

A free tool that I have used over and over is called 'Good Keywords' and is available for download at www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw. Go get this first as we will use it extensively for this part of the project.

Developing your keywords is the most important part of building your online business. The keywords you choose are vital to your success. Choosing top keywords that generate too many search occurrences; and that are too competitive will make it very difficult if not impossible for the average person to obtain top level placement on the major search engines. Choosing keywords that receive too little search volume will get you too the top of the search engines; but since nobody really searches for these keywords; you won't receive any traffic. Therefore; I can not stress enough the importance of choosing the right keywords. Spending a lot of time doing research and brainstorming for this part of your online business will pay off ten fold in the end results.

So how do we analyze keywords? We analyze them one at a time. It will seem a bit tedious but pace yourself; take breaks if you need to; walk away from it and come back later.

We'll start with the list you developed in Part One of this series. When you open the 'Good Keywords' tool; you are presented with a menu. From this menu choose 'Keyword Suggestions'. This will open another window in which you can enter your first keyword in the box provided. Below this box you'll see an option 'Research Using'. Here you can select the engine you want to retrieve data from. Overture US should be the default. If it isn't then lets choose Overture from the drop down list. Depending on how you plan to market your website you may change the 'Research Using' engine. I'll discuss this in more detail in an upcoming article on Marketing Your Website For Performance or PPC.

For the purpose of this exercise lets enter the keyword phrase 'Santa Letter' and click on 'Go'. Sometimes you'll receive a message 'lookup failed'. This is normal and simply means the server is too busy. If this happens just click 'Go' again until you receive results in the right hand window. From my search I received 92 results. You will see from the list that there are many variations of the phrase Santa Letter. What you see are recent incremental results from Overture's database of any searches containing the keyword phrase 'Santa Letter'. The number to the right of each keyword is the number of times that particular phrase has been search for in the past 30 days on Overture.

Now if you were to have compiled a list of keywords for this phrase prior to using this tool then you may already have some of the returned keywords in your list. That's good! That means you were thorough in your research of keyword phrases.

Now let have a look at the list to see what keywords are relevant for us. I am looking for keywords for a campaign or website offering Letters from Santa for children or loved ones at Christmas time. Right away I see one phrase that is 'free from letter Santa'. This is not a phrase I am going to want to use as I am trying to sell a service of providing letters from Santa for a fee. So you can see that not all the results will be relevant to our particular website. What we will do is go through the list and select the ones we want. First; let's go back to the main menu for the Good Keywords tool. We'll click on 'Keyword Organizer'. In the window that opens select 'Keyword Set Menu' and then click on 'Add Keyword Set'. Now in this window type 'Santa Letter' and click OK. This will create a new Keyword set and give us a place to store our keyword research for this particular phrase.

Now going back to the 'Keyword Suggestions' windows; hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard. You'll see one on the left and right side of your keyboard on the very bottom row. While holding Ctrl down; with the mouse; click on a couple of keywords you want to include in your keyword list. Just for the purpose of this exercise we'll select 'letter Santa' and 'from letter Santa'. The selections will be highlighted if done correctly. Using the right mouse button, right click on your second selection; go to Copy to Organizer and select 'Selected Keywords'. Using the drop down menu; select 'Santa Letter' and click the OK button. This will copy only the keywords you've selected to the category 'Santa Letter' in the Keyword Organizer' tool. To verify this; lets go back to the Keyword Organizer for a minute. Click on Santa Letter and you'll see your keywords. This gives us a means of keeping track of only the keywords we want while eliminating some of the confusion from a massive list. Normally; for your own list; you would repeat this process for each of your keywords and keyword phrases you've chosen. For the purpose of this exercise we'll only use those two selected phrases.

Okay so if your still with me; lets go back to the 'Keywords Selection' tool where you should still have the list of keyword results for 'Santa Letter'. Using the mouse; lets double click on 'letter personalized Santa' in the list.

What happens? Double clicking this keyword causes the tool to resubmit that one particular keyword back to Overture to be analyzed. The result is a deeper analysis returning variations of that particular phrase. You will likely have fewer results than your initial search; however this is a crucial part of keyword analysis. You can do this step for any keyword in the list but for instance if you try it with the top keyword the result is actually the same as the original result. Why? Because it is the same two words just in reversed order; therefore the tool will return the same results.

People who omit this part of the keyword building process miss out on huge niche market opportunities.

Now again; as we did before you may right click on whichever keywords you'd like to add to your list and copy them over to the keyword organizer tool. Since this is only an example and we've already covered that I don't feel it's necessary to repeat this process. Also; you can and should continue your research by double clicking any phrase you've added from this new list. I personally follow each and every relevant phrase right until the end where no further results are returned. Be sure to continue to add each new keyword to the 'Keyword Organizer'. This will be your final list that you will use when building and marketing your site.

Now I'm sure you have some questions at this point concerning keywords. For example; how many keywords can I use for my website. Opinions will vary. I have seen recommendations of using a maximum of 25 keywords. Keep the following in mind.

A big part of optimizing your website for top placement in the search engines will be the relationship between 'content' and keywords. This is referred to as 'Keyword Density' and will be the topic of the third installment of 'So You Want To Start An Online Business'. Basically what it refers to is using your chosen keywords in the content of your website; in optimal places and also in a number optimal occurrences. It is possible to use a keyword too much and will actually hurt you in your placement with the search engines. No keyword content in your website or too little also hurts your site; as does having keywords in the wrong places. There are plenty of tools available that will guide you through this process. One of the more popular is IBP or Internet Business Promoter and can be found by doing a search.

In the meantime; continue the development of your keyword list; analyzing results as deeply as possible.

In the next article we will discuss keyword density. You may think this is a bit premature as you haven't even started building your website; but trust me; this is another common mistake people make. It is much easier to have a flowchart to follow when building your site than it is to go back and make changes that allow proper keyword density later. Unless you're a programmer; then you'd have no troubles. Otherwise; spend some time optimizing and refining your keywords; and stay tuned for Part Three.

To Your Success;

Joseph Murray