You have joy of being your own boss. If you are highly motivated, freelance-ing is for you.

Commuting to and from work is no longer an issue. This in turn cuts down on fuel usage, traffic jams and incidents of road rage.

Finally, if you want to work in your sweats, you can. Some business people might protest that being overly casual lowers productivity. I believe that when a person is comfortable, productivity increases. Perhaps I should check into research being completed in this area.

While being a freelance professional may not become your sole source of income, it is a viable opportunity that is growing. I currently work as a freelance web designer and I used to regularly visit my favorite freelance sites and bid on projects. I'm at a point in my career where that is no longer necessary and I have plenty of work. But I still get a sense of accomplishment from successfully bidding on a project and completing work to my customer's satisfaction.

I am an independent freelance professional!

Once you have added all keywords in right pane which are applicable for your site, click on next keyword in left pane which is applicable for your site. Once again, WordTracker will display a list of keywords in right pane which contain keyword you had clicked on in left pane. Again, copy keywords in right pane which are applicable for your site and paste them in first column of your spreadsheet. Also, copy figures present in Count column and paste them in second column beside corresponding keywords. Repeat this process for each of keywords in left pane.

Step 5: Once you have finished with all keywords in left pane, press your browser's Back button a number of times until WordTracker again displays text box which asks you to type in a keyword. Type in second keyword in your original list (i.e. "travel to Australia"), click on "Proceed >>" button and repeat Step 4. Do this for each of keywords that you developed in Step 1.

Step 6: Go to AltaVista. Search for first keyword that is present in your spreadsheet using exact match search (i.e. you should wrap keyword in quotes, i.e. you should type a quotation mark before typing keyword and a quotation mark after typing it). AltaVista will return number of sites which are relevant to that keyword. Add this number to third column of spreadsheet in same row in which keyword is present. Repeat this process for each of keywords present in your spreadsheet. Once you have done that, your first column will contain keywords, your second column will show popularity of keywords and your third column will contain number of sites you are competing against to get a high ranking for those keywords.

Now it's time to calculate KEI!

Step 7: The Keyword Effectiveness Index is square of popularity of a keyword multiplied by 1000 and divided by number of sites which appear in AltaVista for that keyword. It is designed to measure which keywords are worth optimizing your site for. Higher KEI, better keyword. How formula for KEI is arrived at is beyond scope of this article. If you want to know, send a blank email to mailto:kei@1stSearchRanking.com

If you had used spreadsheet file that I created for you (see Step 2), you won't need to enter formula for calculating KEI yourself. The KEI would be automatically calculated for you moment you enter values in columns 2 and 3. You can go straight to Step 8.

In case you didn't download file, here's how you can calculate KEI.

I am assuming that you have created spreadsheet columns in way I recommended in Step 3 and that you are using Microsoft Excel. If you using some other spreadsheet program, you will need to adjust formula to requirements of your spreadsheet program. Click on cell D2. Type in following exactly as it is shown:

=IF(C2<>0,B2^2/C2*1000,B2^2*1000)

Then click on Copy button to copy formula, select all cells in column 4 which have keywords associated with them and press Paste button to paste formula. The KEI for each keyword will be displayed.

Step 8: Use your spreadsheet program's Sort feature to sort rows in descending order of KEI. In Excel 97, you would click on Data menu, click on Sort menu item, choose KEI from drop-down combo box named "Sort by", click on "Descending" option next to it, and then click on OK.

And guess what - that's it! You now know keywords which you should optimize your site for. You can now start optimizing your site one by one for each keyword, starting with keyword with highest KEI. Exactly how many of keywords you choose to optimize your site for largely depends on amount of time that you can spare from your normal business activities. But whatever number of keywords that you target, it obviously makes sense to go for most effective keywords first.

Tying up loose ends:

The number of related keywords that WordTracker displays in trial version is limited. In order to get all keywords which are related to keywords you had developed in Step 1, you would need to subscribe to WordTracker's paid service. We highly recommend that you do subscribe to WordTracker's paid service as otherwise, you will miss out on a lot of keywords that can prove to be extremely valuable to you.