Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Web design and optimisation starts with Keyword Analysis

As in the offline world, starting a website business should begin to some market research. You need to find out if there is demand for a certain product or service and find out how much supply there is.

Keyword analysis is the science of finding out which keywords are the most popular that gets typed into search engines. This shows you the demand as well as what keywords to optimised, kind of like quantitative market research.

I normally use this keyword popularity list to influence web site navigational design. For example if you did some analysis on financial keywords you will soon discover a huge demand for mortage calculators. If I had a mortage company I would make sure that my website hand some kind of calculator on it because that is what people are looking for.

The main tool for keyword analysis is the Wordtracker service. It's quite an intelligence service where you plug in a keyword phrase and it comes back with some numbers on how popular they are together with other suggested keywords.

What is also unique with Wordtracker is that it will also tell you the competing websites for specific keyword phrases. This is the supply side and Wordtracker will crunch the demand and supply figures to indicate how effective a keyword phrase may be to optimise and buy.

Wordtracker lets people trial this service for free but for any serious analysis the service is cheap at about under $8 for a one day access.

Another useful free software tool that I stumbled across is Good Keywords which can tell you how popular keywords are on other types of search engines like Yahoo, Overture and Ask all in the one place.

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