KEI is definitely a good metric to look at when doing keyword research, here is a quick definition:

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) attempts to characterize the value of a keyword based upon its popularity and the number of competing websites. Higher KEI values are “better” in that they represent more searches per website.

Typically KEI is the the ratio of the square of the searches upon a particular keyword in a day divided by the number of websites that are listed for that keyword. For example, a keyword that has 100 searches a day and for which Google shows 5000 websites would have a KEI of 2. (100 * 100 / 5000)

We have found that it is hard to use KEI, not be cause of the calculation, but because it is hard to get reliable data from online searches.  The tools that use KEI, such as Keyword Tracker, Wordze.com, and others, do an absolutely great job at collecting useful data from available sources, but the source isn’t Google (which owns 70% of the marketplace).  To illustrate this point, here is a FAQ from Wordze.com

Understanding the search industry data collection methods is very important for search professionals to be able to do their jobs. If you have not already noticed, each keyword research service’s data (search count) is never the same. Services like Google or Yahoo always show much higher numbers for most keywords, but fail to include lower keywords with substantial traffic. In contrast, services like Wordze normally show a lower count, but include more long tail keywords than services like Google or Yahoo keyword services.

The general rule of thumb is to use a paid keyword tool like Wordze along with a free service like Google keywords to guide you in your keyword selection. Google’s search service (Yahoo’s service is now defunct) is built for searching for keywords under Google’s Adwords program. This service includes data from Google’s search results, ad placement on affiliate sites (Adsense search), as well as other 3rd party sites like AOL, YouTube, etc. The problem with this method is Google does not show keywords that have good traffic, but don’t make it into the top percentile of their search data. It also means that their search data is normally over estimated for search engine optimization research. On the other hand, services like Wordze will normally show lower count, but provide long tail terms along with ranking data that Google will never show. This typically has to do with the fact that such services do not have all the data, but a fraction of it.

So, like many other tools and services, we use a product like Wordze.com to help gain insight on a particular question, but rarely does a calculated KEI become more than another input point of data for our consideration as we are putting together strategy.  It helps us see outliers, but we often find other Keyword Difficulty Tools (i.e. SEOMoz.org) and a manual review of the Top 10 of Google to be just as useful as KEI.

Like a foundation for a building, there is one aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is more important than any other. Without this foundation, you may be wasting all your time and resources. Proper keyword research should be the basis of your optimization.

Keyword research is the practice used by SEO professionals to find actual “search terms” people tend to enter into the search engines when conducting a search for a specific thing. Keyword research is a very vital procedure in SEO. It’s where search engine optimization starts.

Keyword research determines which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. Instinct can be a great resource, but it can also be misleading and is almost always not enough. For example, “search engine optimization” gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while “search engine marketing” gets an estimated 8,800 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target “search engine marketing”, you may get great rankings, but it would only get you half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for “search engine optimization”. There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for without a lot of time and significant amount of link building regardless of how well you optimize your site. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would never even think of. So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target.

Drawing on the analogy in our search marketing parable, optimizing your website without first doing keyword research is like trying to pick apples from a tree without first checking to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could end up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor. So it’s a key component of search engine optimization.

Without good keyword research, your search engine optimization efforts will be like firing a gun into the dark. You may hit something, you may not. You may choose keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are way too competitive for your site at that time. It’s best to know what you need to be targeting.

Are you getting mediocre results from SEO? To achieve success with SEO, you must target the right key phrases and build links consistently. It is a continuous process – not a one-time effort. With this in mind, let us take a look at the 4 SEO mistakes that you must avoid:

1.) You do not tag your pages with relevant keyword phrases. This is the most common mistake that many webmasters made. I believe you have seen websites that place only their company names in their Title tags. Title tags are words that appear on the top left hand side of your Internet browser. You must place keywords in your Title tag because search engines give a lot of weight to it. The title tag is like the Title of a book. It tells readers what the book is about. Likewise, the title tag tells search engines what your website is about. If you are trying to get higher rankings for a keyword but it is not present in your title tag, it is very hard for search engines to award you with high rankings. Therefore, make sure that your title tag describes the content of your page and place important keywords right at the front of it.

2.) You do not have enough content or your content is outdated. SEO is more than just tagging your pages. You need to have enough content for search engines to read. To rank high on search engine listings, you must place keywords in your content. Moreover, if your website content is outdated, search engines will visit your site less often, and thus view it as less important. This also prevents your site from getting higher rankings in search engine listings.

3.) You optimize the wrong keywords. If you are trying to optimize keywords that are too generic, it is very hard for you to achieve success from your SEO effort. This is because you will get yourself into a more competitive battlefield with other optimizers. So, spend some time to do your research and look for key phrases with lesser competition but relevant to your business. Remember that if you optimize keywords that are not relevant or too generic, even if you achieve high rankings for them, there will be no conversion.

4.) You do not build links consistently. Link building is a process of getting more incoming links to your website. Quality inbound links will help your website to achieve higher rankings for competitive keywords. But link building is a continuous process. If you never do it consistently, you will not achieve good result from SEO. So, always build links consistently by using article marketing, blog commenting, directory submissions, and other common strategies that optimizers are using.

Stopwords are a common type of words that search engines generally ignore. Some examples of stopwords include “the”, “is”, “who”, “it”, “on”, and “then”. When people search with these words, search engines focus upon using more meaningful keywords to generate more relevant results.

For example, someone might search for “TV repair in the state of New York”. The search engine would (mostly) ignore “in”, “the”, and “of”, providing results that contain the keywords “TV”, “repair”, “state”, “New”, and “York”. An exception is when the searcher encloses a phrase in quotation marks, but most engines still factor in stopwords to a lesser degree.

So why is this important? Because it can help webmasters determine the best names to give web sites and pages. A title with a lot of stopwords in it will be less effective. Also, business or product names with many stopwords in them can be somewhat harder for searchers to find.

It is less important to emphasize these words in web page text or optimize their keyword density. Some keyword density analyzer software excludes common stopwords. Likewise, webmasters shouldn’t bother putting any stopwords in their META keyword tags, and they ought not be used in the “keywords” field on article or web directories.

Additional stopword examples include “it”, “this”, “that”, “when”, and “be”. Most are under five letters long, with a few exceptions. Specific words vary from one search engine to the next. A few search engines will completely exclude any stopword; for instance, EntireWeb and ExactSeek don’t return any results under “Where Is It?”.

Although the effect of such words remains noteworthy, they aren’t as important as they were some years ago. The search mechanisms employed by major engines have evolved to prevent stopword filters from seriously interfering with the quality of results, so it is now possible to locate websites with names mostly or entirely consisting of stopwords.

One way to find out if words are considered stopwords by Google is to use the suspect words in a search query on Google News. Make sure the query includes at least one non-stopword. If there is at least one stopword, a sentence reading “The following words are very common and were not included in your search… ” will be visible below the search box when results appear.

While the problem of stopwords ought to be taken into consideration, webmasters should also keep in mind that major search engines don’t entirely ignore these words when producing results.

SEO Best Practices often refer to the rule of optimizing for “One Keyword Phrase Per Page” and this is very good advice.   This rule first applies to the most important on-page ranking factor – the or even better would be .

This second title is optimized for both ‘Valentines Gifts’ as well as ‘Gifts for Valentines’.   With our available space of 65 characters, this title is also optimized for ‘Best Valentines Gifts’, ‘Valentines Day Gifts’, and the long tail of ‘Best Valentines Day Gifts’.   Some people would argue that this page is now attempting to optimize for more than one keyword phrase.  Our strategy, in this example, is to primarily optimize for ‘Valentines Gifts’ and then to find the best keyword phrases to use for our variations.

This strategy is extended to the content of the page with use of the primary keyword in the H1 of the page as well as 1-2 times in the first 100 words of the content.  If the page contains 500 words, we feel that you should use the primary keyword 2 -3 times and can use the variations up to 6 – 8 times on the page.  Using our ‘valentines gift’ example, you can use the secondary variations each 1 time on the page.  This thematic variety of the keyword not only provides a wider range of keywords for SEO, but minimizes the keyword stuffing effect that many SEO pages seem unable to avoid.

One last note, be sure to use these different variations as you build links to the page, both internally and externally.  Most analytical programs also let you see which keywords generated traffic to a particular page;  you might be surprised how successful this approach can be if you have a popular page and can monitor the results in your analytics program.