See this keyword research tool in action (screenshot tour) See the description of 10 important features of this tool

In the beginning was the Keyword

Keyword research is the first thing you start thinking about when considering traffic from search engines. You don't? Well, you should. Keyword research must precede any serious search engine optimization work. This fact becomes obvious when you dive in: you can't take the first keyword that occurs to you in connection with your business, and optimize the Web pages accordingly. Imagine for a moment that you want to start selling Web hosting services, and optimize your pages for "Web hosting service" or just "Web hosting", without any prior keyword research. You will hardly receive any traffic from the search engines, taking into consideration that the competition for this keyword is monstrous and your new page has no chance to appear among the top 30. After you learn this lesson, you'll probably want to re-optimize your site for a less competitive keyword like "MyBestCompany Web Hosting", where "MyBestCompany" refers to your company name and the competition is now dead because no one else has yet had a chance to include your company name into their website (and, moreover - in title). Again, you receive no traffic: since your business is new to the Web, no one has ever heard of it and no one types your company name in the search engines to find you, except probably yourself, your friends, family and colleagues who are curious because yesterday you told them you've just opened.

Failing to spot which keywords will bring good volume of targeted visitors may definitely have far-reaching effect on your business. Having learned that lesson, you are on the right way now - looking for a decent keyword research software that will tell you which terms are both moderately competitive and frequently used by your prospects to find the goods or services they need.

Keyword research software and how it can help you

Web CEO offers you an excellent Free SEO Toolkit with an in-built keyword research software. Our Keyword Tool will spy the competitors' pages to find out what keywords or phrases they use to gain top positions; it also can use our proprietary keyword database of real searches to get valuable suggestions. At this point, you will see how competitive each search term is, and how often it is used by the searchers. Our keyword research software will also calculate the so-called KEI (keyword effectiveness index) from these two figures, so that you can quickly sort the keywords by this parameter and see which terms have the best demand-to-competition ratio!

But your research only begins with these simple numbers. The next step will be to research your top 10 competitors for each keyword, and see where the competition is weakest. For instance, if the keyword "digital camera" or similar takes you to compete with monsters like eBay and Amazon and the like, you will probably want to switch to another one where the competitors are more vulnerable in terms of search engine optimization.

At this step, Web CEO keyword research tool gives you the following possibilities:

• a window into the real-time search results of each search engine for the given term;
• the possibility to switch from one keyword to another and fetch the corresponding search results - with a single mouse click;
• real-time calculation of Google PageRank inserted above each competitor (regardless of the search engine you investigate right now) so you can quickly see the PRs of the top-10 sites.

That said, a keyword research tool like Web CEO already gives you the competitive edge: not only you can spy your competitors and top sites for keywords they're using - you can find and research your own terms and predict how well this or that one will work for your site.

But the real fun begins in the 4th tab of Web CEO Keyword Tool. Web CEO will research each keyword's competition as thoroughly as you'd probably never expect from software. When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the keyword competition becomes a complex measure of the leaders' strength that consists of their link popularity, Google PageRank and Search Volume, Alexa Traffic Rank, overall number of pages that have included that key phrase in their TITLE tags, prices that the leaders pay to stay in the top of the paid search results etc., etc. Web CEO will quickly return all this data to you in one convenient table, allowing you to reshuffle keywords according to any parameter, finally discovering those special "money terms".

Note: the fourth step of the keyword research tool is available in the paid (SmallBiz and Professional) versions of Web CEO.

Turn keyword popularity research into fun

If the keyword research algorithm described above looks complex, you just have to download the Free Edition of Web CEO, to make sure that our keyword research software restricts keyword popularity research to a couple of clicks. Enter your base keyword and the program will return words used by the top-ranked sites. Right-click any of them and choose "research" - the software will retrieve up to 1,000 suggestions based on live searches data from over 40 world search engines, and arranged by the number of daily searches. With the next click, you add the keywords you'd like to research further to your basket, and pass to the third tab to look at the competitors. Using the convenient pane, you quickly switch between the keywords in your basket and between the search engines. Finally, in tab 4 you only need to press "Analyze" to get the most vital details in your disposal. Having this report at hand, you will have an easy time deciding which keywords suit you best in terms of popularity and relevancy.

Then you can immediately proceed to search engine optimization of your Web pages. Thankfully, Web CEO Free Edition offers the industry leading tool to tune your pages for top-10 positions in search engines.

More about the factors making up a keyword's potential

In the early days of keyword research, webmasters evaluated a keyword's potential by calculating a simple demand-to competition ratio. Competition meant how many pages could be found on a search engine for this keyword. E.g. if you typed "Web Design" and Google returned "results 1-10 from 4,560,849 found for Web Design", those 4,560,849 pages would be considered "competition". Next, it was necessary to know how many people searched for this keyword daily. For this purpose, webmasters and optimizers used the numerous online keyword research services that gather the so called "live searches data" from smaller search engines and meta-search engines.

In our days, these simple calculations aren't sufficient any more for mission-critical research. For instance, your competition is better expressed by the number of pages that contain the key phrase in their TITLE tags, rather than elsewhere on their pages. The first group of keyword research factors makes the "absolute"part of our keyword research since they don't depend on any given website, rather on the Web situation as a whole. Here belong:

1. Number of pages that contain the keyword in their titles;
2. Daily word searches (how many times a day this key phrase is used in searches);
3. Search Volume estimated by Google;
4. Current bids for the first positions in paid / sponsored results (the higher the bid, the harsher the competition).

Next, since search engine optimization hardly makes sense if it doesn't aim at getting into the top-20 (most web surfers only look through the first 20 results returned for their query), your keyword research should consider the sites on the top 20 positions as your closest competitors. The key idea of the keyword research is to find the keywords where your competitors are the weakest. So it's not merely keywords that you evaluate, you evaluate the competitors for the given keyword indeed. The group of the factors related to leading sites is what we call "relative", or "website-dependent" factors:

1. Google PageRank of the leaders;
2. Link Popularity of the leaders (how many other Web pages link to the top sites);
3. Alexa Traffic Rank of the leaders (shows how much traffic you'd get if you attained the top position).

All these factors, absolute and relative, will help you estimate whether or not a search term is popular enough, and how competitive it is, and, finally, whether it makes sense to use it for optimization.

Seems too sophisticated?...

Keyword Research has never been so easy, on one hand, and so serious - on the other. With Web CEO Keyword Research Tool, you get your own SEO campaign jump-started in minutes. The software also contains comprehensive video and text materials that make your first steps with this and the other Web CEO's tools a breeze. If any questions still arise, our commercial-class tech support is available even to those using the Free Edition.

Don't let the grass grow under your feet

By the way, our Free Edition allows you to make keyword research for your own site and you can download it now. It has NO time limits and you can use it as long as you need.

If you'd like to try the advanced research features, e.g. the advanced keyword competitiveness analysis on the 4th tab, order a paid edition of the program - SmallBiz or Professional. Your purchase will be covered by our unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee so you are welcome to request and receive a complete refund if the software doesn't deliver the value you expected.

 

	Don't take our words for granted, see what experts and users say: Peter Da Vanzo - Editor, Search Engine Blog “There are numerous search engine optimization packages around, however this is one of the most comprehensive. Unlike similar tools, Web CEO includes inbuilt keyword research software, so you can establish exactly which keywords you need to target before the technical optimization work begins. In all, Web CEO features nine separate website promotion tools. Recommended.” >> See other reviews, opinions and users comments