What is SEO?

When you are choosing the keywords for your site, you need to choose words or phrases that:

1. are actually searched for
2. that you can rank reasonably well for

There is little benefit in ranking highly for ‘big red london toffee’ since nobody will actually search for it. And trying to rank highly for, say, ‘cheap software’ may to take years of work and may still not be possible.

So you are looking for the middle path. Phrases that are actually searched for, but are not highly competitive. How competitive a term to target? That depends on your experience, your network of existing sites, the amount of time you intend to spend on link-building and whether you are willing to pay for high ranking links.

I find that as time goes by and I gain more knowledge this becomes easier. If you are just starting, I would target a phrase which is reported as having 500-2000 searches a month. Then gain experience and success with that, and try a harder word next time.

Unfortunately google don’t report how many searches are done for a particular phrase, and about 70% of worldwide searches use google, so all estimates of are inexact. However there are a few tools that can help you out.

The most widely used traffic tool is based on the Overture data - versions of this tool (using the same data) are available at several other sites as well. If you multiply the overture estimates by 2-3 the numbers should be broadly accurate. So if Overture suggests 500 searches a month for a phrase, the real number is probably 1000-1500.

Note: people will often tell you they have done a search for their phrase in google and are ‘number 1 of 5,000,000 results’. This is irrelevant. You are interested in how many people search for a given phrase, not how many pages contain the text. I know this from experience - I have a site that is ranked number 3 out of 188 million results, and brings me about 10 visitors a day. Not very impressive!

An alternative way to assess the value of your phrase is to use the Google Adwords tool. This tool enables you to see how popular a term is compared with similar terms (select the ‘Link Popularity’ option) or how much you would need to pay to rank highly for the term if you advertised in Google Adwords (select ‘Cost and ad position estimates’).

For example, at the time of writing, the tools are estimating a cost per advert of $1.58 for ‘cheap software’ with 1 million searches a month and $0.05 for ‘cheap scottish holidays’, with 50 searches a month. This suggests that a site marketing cheap software will be very difficult to rank highly for, but very lucrative if you can, and a site about cheap scottish holidays’ will be easy to rank highly for, but not get many visitors.

The point is you need to know before you start which keywords you are targetting, and how popular they are. There is no point in casually mentioning ‘cheap software’ once or twice and hoping to appear for that phrase, because you won’t. But a site built around Scottish holidays, with each page based around a different phrase - ‘cheap scottish holidays’, ’scottish holidays’, remote scottish holidays’, ’scottish mountain holidays’ etc could actually end up being quite an attractive and lucrative niche to focus on.

There is a school of thought that you should ignore keywords and just build an interesting site, which will inevitably attract people who are interested in your subject. There is another school of thought that it is better to spend a long time choosing the best keywords, and then quickly put a site together around that phrase.

As always, it is the middle ground that I would recommend. Build a site around a subject that interests you, but keep an eye on which keywords you are focussing on.