Analyzing Keywords Continuing on from Part One of ‘So You Want to Start an Online Business’; we will be taking the list of keywords you have developed and further expand, eliminate and analyze each one. The end result will be a solid set of keywords and phrase that will greatly improve your chances of top placement on the search engines in your chosen market.

If you followed through with the exercises from Part One you should have a good solid list of keywords to work with. If you don’t; please go back to Part One of this article and develop the keyword list first. Your list should consist of every possible relevant keyword for your market; including very general to very specific keywords.

So lets get down to the analyzing.

A free tool that I have used over and over is called ‘Good Keywords’ and is available for download at www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw. Go get this first as we will use it extensively for this part of the project.

Developing your keywords is the most important part of building your online business. The keywords you choose are vital to your success. Choosing top keywords that generate too many search occurrences; and that are too competitive will make it very difficult if not impossible for the average person to obtain top level placement on the major search engines. Choosing keywords that receive too little search volume will get you too the top of the search engines; but since nobody really searches for these keywords; you won’t receive any traffic. Therefore; I can not stress enough the importance of choosing the right keywords. Spending a lot of time doing research and brainstorming for this part of your online business will pay off ten fold in the end results.

So how do we analyze keywords? We analyze them one at a time. It will seem a bit tedious but pace yourself; take breaks if you need to; walk away from it and come back later.

We’ll start with the list you developed in Part One of this series. When you open the ‘Good Keywords’ tool; you are presented with a menu. From this menu choose ‘Keyword Suggestions’. This will open another window in which you can enter your first keyword in the box provided. Below this box you’ll see an option ‘Research Using’. Here you can select the engine you want to retrieve data from. Overture US should be the default. If it isn’t then lets choose Overture from the drop down list. Depending on how you plan to market your website you may change the ‘Research Using’ engine. I’ll discuss this in more detail in an upcoming article on Marketing Your Website For Performance or PPC.

For the purpose of this exercise lets enter the keyword phrase ‘Santa Letter’ and click on ‘Go’. Sometimes you’ll receive a message ‘lookup failed’. This is normal and simply means the server is too busy. If this happens just click ‘Go’ again until you receive results in the right hand window. From my search I received 92 results. You will see from the list that there are many variations of the phrase Santa Letter. What you see are recent incremental results from Overture’s database of any searches containing the keyword phrase ‘Santa Letter’. The number to the right of each keyword is the number of times that particular phrase has been search for in the past 30 days on Overture.