I find that far too many people think that they can just make a site and it will be successful.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  It just doesn’t work that way.  After all, if you’re building a site that’s all about something no one cares about, then you’re the only person who will ever visit your site.  On the other hand, if you’re building a site that’s all about a topic that’s wildly popular, then your competition is pretty stiff and you’ll have a hard time getting your site listed on the first page of Google.  When there are 18 million other sites offering information about the same popular topic as your site, then you’re in a tough spot.  So what do you do?

Keyword research is the answer.  Wordtracker is one of my favorite tools for determining how many people are searching for a particular topic.  But it’s not just about whether there are enough people that are interested in the topic, it’s all about finding a niche that has enough people who are searching for the topic, yet relatively few sites that offer information on the topic.  If you can find one of those, you’ve got a gold mine.  Wordtracker is an online subscription service that offers not only how many people are searching for phrases, they also give you the number of sites that Google shows in their search results pages.  Take those two numbers and you’ve got a ratio that can quickly tell you if there’s a diamond in the rough.  Wordtracker refers to this ratio as the K.E.I. or the Keyword Efficiency Index.   High numbers are better so you can immediately look at a long list of keywords and sort the list by the KEI column and instantly see which words are the easiest to go after.  Hope that helps a little.

To your online success.  Now go take on the web.

Chadd Bryant