How's that list coming along? You will recall in the first part of this series I covered getting a list together of ideas for your site or blog niche. Hopefully you have a good sized list of general categories. The next steps involve narrowing the keywords and then doing some supply and demand research.

There are many keyword tools out there. I like to use Overture's because it's free and easy. Keep in mind that the numbers from Overture are usually inflated ? sometimes a little sometimes a lot. They fudge the numbers by counting like queries ? fly and flies or affiliate and affiliates get counted as the same query. Remember ? they make more money convincing their prospective advertisers that a search term is popular.

So plug in one of the general search terms from your list. I'm going to try dogs. Here are the results:

Searches done in February 2006

Count Search Term

1104234 dog

225786 dog breed

183180 dog training basics

152056 dog show

139072 dog breeders

98321 dog name

97021 dog training

91172 dog picture

88480 dog for sale

62657 dog grooming

56907 dog gift

I edited a few like snoop dog out for expediency. I like dog breeds and dog training [basics]. Looks like people are searching for both quite a bit. Now that we have the demand, let's go over to Google and check the supply.

Type in the exact search term, putting quotes around it so Google searches for exactly what we want. If you put in dog breeds, Google returns 5,59o,000 results. Look in the upper right-hand corner for this number.

Ever heard of Sumatra Roy? Probably not. He's a man who specializes in SEO and particular keyword research. He has invented a formula called the Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI to measure the potential of a keyword. I use a simpler version of it. Here it is:

KEI = Demand / Supply

That is - Demand divided by Supply. The higher the KEI the better. This gives you a simplified KEI that ranges from 1-10. People compare this to the Richter Scale, meaning that each successive number is exponentially better than the last number.

In our example above, the KEI for dog breed would be .04, which isn't that great.

Dog Training Basics yields 45,600 results for Google. The KEI would be 4, which is terrific. Hmm?wait a minute. That concludes our lesson. Bye. [Sound of running down the hallway and door slamming]. A little nerd humor there.

Do a few more and see what you come up with. I did dog name and got a KEI of .10, which is lousy. I also tried dog gift, which got me a KEI of .07.

I usually pick up the highest KEI keywords and plug them back into the Overture tool and try it again.

Incidentally, Wordtracker does this all for you. Try it for free and see how easy it is. Just keep in mind that they use different sources for both supply and demand than my example above, but that shouldn't make too much of a difference.

So now we should have a much smaller list that has some good prospects on it.