Choosing keywords that will bring extra traffic to your website is something that SEO experts are trained to do. There is a popular method of choosing keywords that invloves calculation of something called KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index). KEI was devised by Sumantra Roy, a Search Engine Positioning specialist from http://www.1stSearchRanking.net. KEI is a very helpful indicator, but in my opinion, it is slightly flawed.

The KEI is basically a comparison of number of times a search term is searched versus number of search engine result pages that come up for that keyword phrase.

For example, let's say that you are developing a widget website. You want to sell lots of widgets. You do some research using *Overture's search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/). You find out that following terms are searched a lot:

widget, red widget, blue widget, green widget, yellow widget.

You then go to *Yahoo and type in search terms to see how many websites show up for each term and you come up with following table: keyword phrase = widget # times searched = 10,000 # resulting pages = 1,000,000 KEI = 100

keyword phrase = red widget # times searched = 9,000 # resulting pages = 950,000 KEI = 85.26

keyword phrase = blue widget # times searched = 8,000 # resulting pages = 120,000 KEI = 533.33

keyword phrase = green widget # times searched = 7,900 # resulting pages = 900,000 KEI = 69.34

keyword phrase = yellow widget # times searched = 6,300 # resulting pages = 994,000 KEI = 39.93

According to KEI ratio, best keywords to choose are those with a high KEI (ie. most popular keywords, with lowest competition). This is a basic law of supply and demand. Based on chart above you might think,

"Ah ha! I should target blue widgets because it has a high KEI ratio."

The problem with this is that you are making assumption that a low quanity of competition is more important than quality of competition. This is a major FLAW. KEI does not factor in QUALITY of competion only quantity. I have come up with a simple method for determining quality of competition using *Google *Page Rank (although a better solution could be created based on backlinks of relevant sites).

This simple method is done by calculating average Page Rank for first n resulting pages for a given keyword search (where n is number of pages you want to be ranked in). So turning back to example above, let's say you want to be in top 10 (n=10) search engine ranking for blue widgets. Go to your search engine of choice or use your tool of choice and type in blue widgets as your keyword. Then check each page's PageRank in top ten results. Divide that number by 10. This calculates what I call KPI (Keyword Page Rank Index). The formula looks like this:

(P1+P2+..+PN)/N (where n is number of pages you are adding)

In my example above, let's look at new results:

Welcome to part five in this search engine positioning series. Last week we discussed importance of content optimization. In part five we will cover your website's internal linking structure and role that it plays in ranking highly, and in ranking for multiple phrases.

While this aspect is not necessarily single most important of ten steps it can be difference between first page and second page rankings, and can make all difference in world when you are trying to rank your website for multiple phrases.

Over this series we will cover ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

1. Keyword Selection
2. Content Creation
3. Site Structure
4. Optimization
5. Internal Linking
6. Human Testing
7. Submissions
8. Link Building
9. Monitoring
10. The Extras

Step Five - Internal Linking

With all talk out there about linking, one might be under impression that only links that count are those from other websites. While these links certainly play an important role (as will be discussed in part eight of this series) these are certainly not only important links.

When you're about to launch into your link work why not stop and consider ones that are easiest to attain and maximize first. That would be, ones right there on your own site and those which you have total and complete control of. Properly used internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal.

The internal linking structure can:

1. Insure that your website gets properly spidered and that all pages are found by search engines
2. Build relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase
3. Increase PageRank of an internal page

Here is how internal linking structure can affect these areas and how to maximize effectiveness of internal linking on your own website.

Getting Your Website Spidered

Insuring that every page of your website gets found by search engine spiders is probably simplest thing you can do for your rankings. Not only will this increase number of pages that a search engine credits your site with, but it also increases number of phrases that your website has potential to rank for.

I have seen websites that, once search engines find all of their pages, find that they are ranking on first page and seeing traffic from phrases they never thought to even research or target.

This may not necessarily be case for you however having a larger site with more pages related to your content will boost value of your site overall. You are offering this content to your visitors, so why hide it from search engines.

Pages can be hidden from search engines if linking is done in a way that they cannot read. This is case in many navigation scripts. If your site uses a script-based navigation system then you will want to consider implementation of one of internal linking structures noted further in article.

Additionally, image-based navigation is spiderable however search engines can't see what an image is and thus, cannot assign any relevancy from an image to page it links to other than assigning it a place in your website hierarchy.

Building The Relevancy Of A Page To A Keyword Phrase

Anyone who wants to get their website into top positions on search engines for multiple phrases must start out with a clearly defined objective, including which pages should rank for which phrases. Generally speaking it will be your homepage that you will use to target your most competitive phrase and move on to targeting less competitive phrases on your internal pages.

To help build relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase you will want to use keyword phrase in anchor text of links to that page. Let's assume that you have a website hosting company. Rather than linking to your homepage with anchor text "home" link to it with text "web hosting main". This will attach words "web" and "hosting" and "main" to your homepage. You can obviously leave word "main" out if desirable however in many cases it does work for visitor (you know, those people you're actually building site for).

This doesn't stop at homepage. If you are linking to internal pages either through your navigation, footers, or inline text links - try to use phrases that you would want to target on those pages as linking text. For example, if that hosting company offered and wanted to target "dedicated hosting", rather than leaving link at solely beautiful graphic in middle of homepage they would want to include a text link with anchor text "dedicated hosting" and link to this internal page. This will tie keywords "dedicated hosting" to page.

In a field as competitive as hosting this alone won't launch site to top ten however it'll give it a boost and in SEO, especially for competitive phrases, every advantage you can give your site counts.

Increasing The PageRank Of Internal Pages