Determining the Right Keywords to Attract Traffic to your Site

Determining the right keywords to attract traffic to your site
Several millions of search queries are conducted on the internet search engines each day People all around the world try to find information about various topics. So what are they really looking for then? What controls their choices of searches? Several of the major search engines provide the user a way to look into the web's query stream to see what the most popular search keywords or topics. Below we list some of them. We will also cover some of the special web sites that will assist you in making the right keywords. There are still some free sites around that will give the users some hints to what kind of keywords the web users will use at the moment. There are also several semi-professional to expert sites/companies that assist and do research for what keywords would benefit web site owner to have in their content on their web sites to attract traffic.
• Google Trends: Will let you to look into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular or not. You can view the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, and languages and so on. Compare multiple keuwords (up to 4 at a time), as well.

• AOL Hot Searches: Will let you see the top current queries, or even see thosemost popular in the last hour, last day or within particular categories.

• Google Zeitgeist: To make research on what people are looking for at Google and its associated specialty services in a variety of categories. There are versions for various countries, as well.

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Enter a term or terms, the use the drop-down box to see the popularity of terms and popularity over time.

• Ask IQ: See top searches at the search engine Ask.

• Dogpile SearchSpy: Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service.

• Lycos 50: Long-standing service showing top searches at Lycos each week.

• MSN Search Insider: Top 200 queries on MSN Search (annoyingly in random order), top "movers" in TV, sports and music, and a "duels" feature pitting top queries in a race against each other.

• Yahoo Buzz Index: Shows you what's hot and what's not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.

• dWoz Search Phrase Lists: Great directory of services like those above, for search engines large and small, across the web.

• Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool: Formerly called the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool before that, this free service is primarily designed to help advertisers who wish to select terms to target with ads on the Yahoo network. But you can use it to see how popular particular terms are.

• Researching Keywords: For Search Engine Watch members, this provides an annotated rundown on key tools useful for search marketers needing to perform search research for their campaigns.

• Search Term Research and Search Behavior: These categories of Search Engine Watch's Search Topics area compile articles on the subject of how people search from across the web and stretching back to 1997. Available only to Search Engine Watch members.
So, lets look at some of the most used keywords globally in 2007

First out is the keyword iphone.

We see that specific events control peaks in the keyword use, such as in the end of 2006 when Cisco sued Apple over the iPhone., then another major event caused the third peak, which happened in mid 2007 when BusinessWeek make its announcement. Minor jump or stabilizing in use of this word became apparent when Apple slashed the prices of iPhone, and of course the same happened when it was announced that iphone was to be launched in Europe.
Not surprisingly United States makes most use of the keyword followed by some European countries and India. Majority of searches are made in English, although the Russian language follows closely after.

Another keyword reaching up amongst the 10 most used words are badoo. The second most used keyword globally in 2007 does maybe not make any sense in the English language, however for Italian, Spanish and French speaking regions it makes sense. Its rapid increase in traffic from 0 in 2006 and linearly through 2007 must have been caused by something. Looking at the countries this keyword is used most in Italy and Venezuela followed by Spain and Colombia and finally France. So what does this word mean in English? The website www.badoo.com, a photo sharing site for members to put their pictures in may have something to do with the use of this keyword. So looking into these trends it is natural to think that popular websites will govern the popularity of the keywords.

Therefore it is not surprising to see words like badoo, facebook, youtube, and ebuddy since they all refer to very popular websites during 2007.

What we can see clearly is that Youtube and Facebook keywords has relatively much higher usage than words like ebuddy and badoo. And we can also observe that news events control peaks or trend changes in these keywords. This is very interesting seen from a market stand point of view. It tells us that keyword usage is very much controlled by news in media surrounding us daily. That means when launching web sites or starting a new content, the web site owners needs to reflect their content to long lasting trends, but also take into consideration short term fluctuations in use of keywords, governed by news events in that time they are working up viewers for their web site content.

So the most used keywords in 2007 according to Google Zeitgeist are as follows:
1. iphone
2. badoo
3. facebook
4. dailymotion
5. webkinz
6. youtube
7. ebuddy
8. second life
9. hi5
10.club penguin

How come that words like dailymotion and webkinz makes it so high in global ranking? Again this is web sites, becoming increasingly popular on the internet amongst web users.

Dailymotion becomes the second largest videosharing Community to promote Warner Music Video content and is most popular in France and Webkinz are stuffed animals which have their own website, and has most popularity in France for some reason or the other.

The last words on the most popular keywords globally in 2007 are;
11. ebuddy
12. second life
13. hi5
14. club penguin
How do these words fit in the popularity scale?
Lets start with the word ebuddy. eBuddy is an online messenger for MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, MySpace and AIM (AOL). Whether you're at home, school, work or traveling; with eBuddy enable you to chat online everywhere anytime. eBuddy is available as a web based and mobile version. eBuddy provides instant messaging on every computer, it even works when you are behind a firewall and it's free.

Then hi5 keyword; a website ala facebook, where you can find friends in your hometown or other parts of the world. You can show off your photos and listen to music you like. You can even watch and share cool videos and build your own page and express what's important to you. This keyword is by far the most popular of the four ones we listed up last here.
The users could live a virtual life on second life web site, and made this keyword’s popularity grow in 2007 as well.

So what it boils down to is, that in order to choose the right keywords, you need to do lots of market research about trends in website usage, and news events just happened or happening at the time you want your content launched.
There is never one specific solution to what keywords you should use. Just looking at the trend in keyword usage in first quarter of 2008 will tell you how dynamic this choice of keyword is.

Let us look at what is the status for these words in January 2008.

All terms have a stable flat trend through all January this year, and Youtube has a dramatically larger search volume than ebuddy, second life and club penguin.
When it comes to the words iphone, ebuddy, dailymotion, badoo and webkinz, the same trend comes through, stable and flat in volume although dailymotions shows some smaller peaks, but does not have any major news event connected to these. However apple launches the iPod Touch as well as Webkinz announces their latest kid’s models outfits in this period. At the same time we see that the traffic volume is far lower than the keyword Youtube has. So the keyword Youtube has become a stronger keyword in search volume.

What are the factors that affect search engine rankings
Thorough analysis of trends and events in the local, regional and global markets.
Why your competitors are getting top rankings
They spend time continously to evaluate the market and look into trends that are happening right now. A need for extensive market research in a dynamic way.
How to target the right keywords
Do your homework when it comes to market analysis and behaviour patterns, even look into demography in your market and determine what their main interests are. Just like supermarkets have done over the last 10 years to detect your behaviour to make you buy the products and place the products in the right location. The same you have to do, just look at your web site as the local, regional or global supermarket, and satisfy your clients, and be loyal to them.
What are the seemingly invisible factors the search engines use to rank your site
What are inbound links and how many do you need to beat the top sites
How to optimize your pages without the risk of being penalized
Finding the most suitable links for your site
These latter topics i will cover in my next article, and you will be able to read in more detail on my web site www.lulu.com/stig.