The Ten Commandments of Keyword Selection
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Is your website getting a lot of traffic, but not a lot of sales? Maybe you need to take a look at the keywords you're using. Praveen Viswanath walks you through keyword selection process, and sums it up with ten keyword selection commandments to help keep you on track.

A term or a phrase used by a searcher to find information on a particular topic is called a "keyword." "Keyword selection" is the process of scrutinizing different prospective keywords to select the right ones for your campaign. It is the stepping stone to your success in the Web world. Find the right keyword, and you strike gold. Make a mistake, and you've just punched yourself in the face.

There are two categories of people interested in keyword selection: those trying to get more website traffic in general, and those trying to get more ‘qualified’ traffic. This article is for the latter type. What is the use, if you have some 10,000 hits a day but the business conversion is just 0.1%? Wouldn't it be better to have only 1000 visitors with a 30% conversion rate? After all, 300 is better than 10. From here on, whatever we do, our final aim shall be to get more "qualified" traffic.

Keyword Analysis or Keyword Research

We move on with the first step in keyword selection. This is keyword analysis. To start with, we need at least one keyword. So we determine a primary keyword. This should be very specific. If you are trying to sell televisions of some particular model--say Sanyo--use the primary keyword "Sanyo television" instead of "television" alone. In a recent study conducted by one of the major search engines, it was revealed that more than 65% of all searches made use of phrases rather than single words.

Visit the following websites, type in your primary keyword, and get a collection of highly searched related keywords. Look for the top 30 of the collection. Don’t forget to make a note of the count of each keyword. Please note that the count may differ with various websites since the amounts of search traffic they get vary. So take the count results from only a single site.

• Overture tool
  (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion)
   
• Wordtracker tool [recommended]
  (http://our.affiliatetracking.net/wordtracker/a/12246)
   
• Google Sandbox Tool
  (https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=Keyword
  Sandbox)
   
• Espotting Tool
  (http://www.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp)
   
• Related Pages
  (http://www.related-pages.com/adwordskeywords.aspx)

Now that we have a good collection of keywords, we start taking note of the competition that you have for each keyword. This part is easy. Just search for each keyword enclosed with double quotes in Google and take note of the number of websites shown on the top right corner(you will see something like 1-10 of "the total number" ). We move on to the next step.