Choosing Keywords - The Truth about KEI

by George Manty, 3/27/2007

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 involves the 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 the number of times a search term is searched versus the 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 the following terms are searched a lot:

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

You then go to Yahoo and type in the search terms to see how many websites show up for each term and you come up with the following list:

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 the KEI ratio, the best keywords to choose are those with a high KEI (ie. the most popular keywords, with the lowest competition). This is a basic law of supply and demand. Based on the chart above you might think, "Ah ha! I should target blue widgets because it has a high KEI ratio."

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