Wordtracker Tutorial
October 25, 2005 – 9:52 pm
Here's a quick tutorial on using Wordtracker to gain an insight into the keyphrases you either currently use on your web site or the phrases you are intending to use. Firstly open up Wordtracker Free Trial in a seperate window (Ctrl + click for firefox users). Enter your name and email address into the boxes, this is just to email you the results of your search and nothing more.
The trial will launch into a new window. Here it asks for a key phrase, so put one of your key phrases in. Step 2 is where Wordtracker has searched through it's database finding 15 related key phrases including yours being at position number 1. Now what to do is click on the first phrase in position 1. When you click on this phrase a table will appear on the right of the screen showing the top 15 search phrases in the past 130 days, containing the phrase that you clicked on. The table will show the following, the phrase searched on, the number of times that phrase was searched for over the past 130 days, the predicted number of searches for that phrase over the same period, and the opportunity to dig deeper with that phrase ie. if the phrase was "shopping carts" then by clicking on the dig symbol it would produce a table with all phrases that contain the phrase "shopping carts" in it, and their count and prediction values, therefore narrowing your results down even further.
At this point you need to choose any phrases that get a reasonable amount of searches and are related to your web site subject and content. I would recommend only choosing phrases that have received more than 1000 searches however you can go lower if you want to (1000 searches over 130 days translates to just under an average of 7 searches a day which isn't that many). To analyse a phrase just click on the phrase and it will automatically be added to your "basket" (no you're not buying them, just storing them!).
If you're not happy with the phrases given on the right you can choose another suggested phrase on the left and see what that offers you. You can store up to 30 phrases in your basket for each 'session', however the trial is unlimited so you can look at other phrases one after the other. Once you're happy with your basket contents click on the bottom right link to proceed to step 3.
Step 3 will list all of the phrases in your basket and give you the option of removing any you're not happy with. Here you can compare everything you've chosen including the number of times each phrase has been searched on. Once you are happy with your list click the link for step 4 which will analyse your phrases.
Once step 4 is complete you will see the results of the analysis. Here you are shown the phrase, it's KEI*, number of times the phrases is searched on within 24 hours and the number of competing web sites that also come up for this phrase. The trial searches MSN for it's final stage which is really good as it gives more accurate information for searchers.
* KEI is the analysis figure of the phrase, i.e. a figure determined by Wordtracker by using the number of times the phrase is searched on and also the number of other competing websites using that phrase. Therefore if the number of searches are low, regardless of the number of competing web sites you will always have a low KEI. Alternatively if the search figure is reasonably high but the number of competing web sites is even higher then the KEI will also be low. The KEI scale is given at the top of the page to give you an idea about your results. If the KEI is between 0 and 10 then it's not worth the hassle unless you are dead, dead certain you can get onto the front page (note this is still achievable with paid advertising), if the KEI is between 10 and 100 then it's a relatively okay key phrase however again it could be a waste of your time worrying about it. If the KEI is between 100 and 400 then you've got a good phrase to work with and I recommend you concentrate on these. KEI's can go over 400 as I've recently discovered, however it's a rareity (spelling anyone?) and if you do find one do something about it!!
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