To figure out how effective a keyword is going to be you need to look at two values:*the popularity of that word as a search term, and *the competition of that word as a keyword.
To find our how popular a search term is you can use a service like Wordtracker.com, or if you advertise through Overture or Google you can access their respective search term data. Whichever route you choose these services allow you to look up keywords, and how many times they area searched each month. This is very important because obviously it is much more beneficial to rank highly on a word that is searched a thousand times a month, as opposed to one that is search a hundred times a month. If you're trying to put keywords in your title or domain doing this analysis is especially important.
The other value you need to be interested in is how much competition is out there. You can simply do a search on Google and look at how many results are returned to get a basic analysis of the competition. You could also use the Google Toolbar (
http://toolbar.google.com) to check the PageRank of the top ranking sites for your ideal search terms. Once you get more experienced at website publishing and promotion you will be able to estimate how much work it will take to get to the top for your search terms by checking the PageRank of the currently high ranked sites.
The idea is to pick keywords with the least resistance and the highest payoff. You're doing yourself a great disservice if you skip this step. If you spend months getting ranked highly on a certain set of words only to find out you could be getting ten times the traffic if you had worked on a different set of words you'll regret it.
One way to compare keywords is to use a keyword effectiveness index, or KEI. What this will do is give you a visual aid that lets you gauge how much success you can expect to have with any given keyword.
To construct a keyword effectiveness index you simply need to plot a chart with search volume on the x-axis and either Google PR of the first site returned or total results returned on the y-axis. The x-axis represents benefit and the y-axis represents inherent difficulty to achieve the top spot. You want to optimize for words with low difficult and high benefit. Otherwise known as the path of least resistance.
The idea is to find a keyword that will result in a point that is as red as possible.
I cannot stress enough how important this is. There are often drastic differences between related keywords and choosing the right words to optimize for can be the difference between success and failure.
By: Chris Beasley