Recently I subscribed to wordtracker.com however, I am wondering what the most effective way of using this tool is?

I am currently going through the following steps:

1. I type in a *fairly* general term. ie. self emploed mortgage
2. Then (on the left) a list of general somewhat related terms come up and I click on the ones that I feel are related.
3. Each time I click on one on the left, I get a list of keyword phrases within that general term. I select the keyword phrases that I feel are the most appropriate.
4. Once I have built a complete list (usually 40-70) of keyword phrases I click continue.
5. Then I double check the list and remove any that I think don't fit.
6. Competition search: I usually just select Google and Yahoo because I really don't think that there is any point in optimizing for the other search engines.

7. I usually run 3 different comp. searchs -
i) KEI - on & Quotes - off
ii) KEI - on & Quotes - on
iii) KEI - off & Quotes - on

My theory with i) is to see which individual phrases are the highest KEI ratio. If there are some that are higher (for example 3+), I make those the first few keywords I go for.

Then ii) see if there are any exact phrases that have a high KEI (generally there are, and the KEI's are much higher). I add those to my list which I optimize for.

Then iii) I use the top exact phrases with the least amount of competing pages (usually I select phrases with less than 10,000 pages - usually less than 3,000)

8. After I have compiled this list together, I strip out any duplicates and put them in the order of i), ii), iii). I use this new stripped down list as my META keywords usually 10-25 total phrases.

9. I try to incorporate the exact phrases (if it makes sense) into the content info of my site.


----

This is what I have been doing... I have a few questions. Am I using the tool correctly? Are there better ways to use it? The (?) beside count indicates the amount of times that particular phrase appears in the wordtracker database... Does that mean, that is how many people in the last 90 days has entered that exact phrase???

Any help is appreciated.

Hello there

My name is Anne Curtis and I am Customer Support Manager for Wordtracker, so I hope I can help you.

Having read your methodology it does seem to be logical. One alternative you might like to try is experimenting with our new Keyword Researcher which is available from the members home page.

It will give you a great deal of flexibility such as selecting words which contain a particular phrase from a longer list. As a bonus you can export results straight to Excel which is very handy. If you need help learning to use this please contact me at support@wordtracker.com.

With regard to your specific question - yes the count is for the number of times your exact phrases has been searched for on our database over the last 90 days.

Do please contact me if I can help further.

Regards

Anne Curtis
Customer Support Manager
Wordtracker
LinkedIn: Anne Curtis