Ever wonder how to determine which keywords to use to direct the most traffic to your web site? Wordtracker is a great tool to help you make that determination.
So you created your website and submitted it for indexing at various search sites. Now you sit and wait for all those visitors to arrive. But how did you decide which keywords to focus on in your website content? These keywords are vital to ensuring that people find you when searching the web for relevant terms or phrases.
Net surfers are probably not discovering or searching for your site the way you thought they would. Ask someone outside of your business (like your customers!) what words they would use in a search window when looking for your site (or for the things offered at your site). When you have a few prime choices to work with, visit Wordtracker.
Wordtracker lets you input a chosen keyword and then provides you with a list of alternative, related keywords. You can then take each alternative (or your original) and get an estimate of the amount of traffic (or “hits”) you would expect to receive from each keyword over a 24-hour period as a result of people searching for this word or phrases containing this word. That’s assuming you are in the top results for the relevant searches at the major search sites.
You can also select one of these words or phrases and find out how many other sites are using it as well, sites you will be competing with for those top search-results positions. You can view the results immediately and have them sent to you as email.
If you have an idea of the likely traffic a keyword might bring and the number of other sites using this keyword, you can better judge which words to focus on at your site. The more popular a keyword, the more traffic it will bring, but the more likely there is to be competition - meaning it will be hard to get your site in the top search results.
Ergo, you want to find the most popular, relevant keywords with the least competition. Not easy!
The site offers two versions of the service: the free trial version and the full subscription version.
The free trial will find 15 related words and phrases for each keyword you look at. You can then take each keyword and the service will present the relevant statistics for the word and a handful of search phrases using this word. Competitor info is only drawn from one search engine, AltaVista.
The full subscription ranges in price from US$19.95 for one week’s access to US$197 for a full year. What do you get with the full subscription? Wordtracker will find up to 300 related terms (including misspellings) for each suggested keyword, and then a further 500 variations per search. The data is also drawn from a larger database and more search sites (so you can identify the most promising keywords for different search sites, not just AltaVista).
The best approach would be to test the results from the trial version before making a financial investment. If you are going to choose a full year subscription, you must be willing to utilize the service at least a few times per month and make the appropriate changes at your website to reap the potential rewards.
