If you're in the search engine industry, or if you're a Web designer or Webmaster, it's an almost sure thing that you've heard of, and probably used, Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com).

But, for those who may not know about Wordtracker, let's back up for a minute.
What exactly is Wordtracker, and why is it so important?

Most search engine optimizers would agree that one of the most important things you can do for your Web site is to target the right keywords. If you target the wrong keywords, you may get scores of traffic but no conversions to sales, or no traffic whatsoever. Either is disastrous for an online business.

Before Wordtracker, it was up to the search engine marketer, or the client, to choose the right keywords for the site. We also had GoTo's Search Term Suggestion Tool, which was one of our only sources for keyword help at that time.

Then Wordtracker entered the picture. With Wordtracker, you can plug in some keywords, and the Web-based service will give you ideas for additional keywords that might work for your business. Not only that, but the service will also tell you how competitive those keywords are (how many other Web pages have been optimized with those keywords in mind) and how many people have actually searched for those keywords in the past 24 hours at each of the major engines.

Ideally, your goal is to choose a keyword phrase that doesn't have a huge amount of competition but that (hopefully) a large number of people are searching for. This is where the KEI comes in. KEI, which stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, refers to the number of times a keyword has appeared in Wordtracker's data compared with the number of competing Web pages, which points to which keywords would be most effective for your search engine marketing campaign.

In other words, the higher the KEI, the more popular your keyword phrases are, and the less competition they have. According to Wordtracker, a "good" keyword to target is one that has a KEI of around 100, but an "excellent" keyword to target has a KEI of over 400.
Okay, enough of the background into Wordtracker. Most of you probably already know all of that. In fact, your path through Wordtracker most likely looks very similar to mine.

The "old" way to use Wordtracker

In the past, I have always started at Keyword Universe, or maybe at Keyword Projects. From there, I work my way through the system. Does it work? Yes, very effectively. Is it time consuming? Yep.

But, let's look at an easier, and even more effective, way to use Wordtracker. And with this alternate way, you're actually considering keyword phrases based on your target audience.
Introducing John Alexander

To write this article, I interviewed John Alexander, an authority of Wordtracker who has spent countless hours working through each of the features and developing his own unique strategy.

As means of introduction, John is a professional search engine optimizer with Beyond-SEO (http://www.beyond-seo.com) and a trainer of onsite search engine marketing workshops through Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).
Besides using Wordtracker to find keywords, John actually uses the service to target an audience's surfing behavior. Once he determines the surfing behavior, he can use that knowledge to target those who are most likely to purchase his clients' products or services.
Unlike most of us, John doesn't get "stuck" in Keyword Universe to where the system does all the thinking for him. Instead, he begins at Comprehensive Search (found under the Multiple Search heading).

He explains, "Where you'll find most of your 'revelations' or 'insights' is in the Comprehensive Search feature of Wordtracker. Try entering one part of a search phrase and letting Comprehensive Search figure out the best 'full use' of the phrase."

Let's look at an example

John has a client who sells baby furniture and products online, so he needed to find the target audience for baby furniture. Putting his creative mind at work, he started thinking about who would want to buy baby beds and strollers. Not people with newborns - after all, they already own all of the furniture they need. The true audience for his client is soon to become parents, grandparents, etc.

His next step was to use Comprehensive Search to try to determine what his target audience is looking for. John typed in "baby," and he found some very interesting results.
People searching for the word "baby" were searching for keyword phrases like "baby names," "Baby Names," "Baby Boy Names," and so forth.

Bingo! He had the angle he needed to get traffic to the site. Rather than concentrating on the actual product he was trying to sell, he thought of a way to pull in traffic through a different window. After all, what will his target audience be looking for on the Internet? Ideas for names for their new babies!

(Continued in Part 2. Contact Robin at RobinN@acws.com for the complete article)