Choosing Keywords - The Truth about KEI - page 2

by George Manty, 3/27/2007

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

This simple method is done by calculating the average PageRank for the first n resulting pages for a given keyword search (where n is the number of pages you want to be ranked in). So turning back to the example above, let's say you want to be in the 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 the top ten results. Divide that number by 10. This calculates what I call the KPI (Keyword PageRank Index). The formula looks like this:

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

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

keyword phrase = widget # times searched = 10,000 # resulting pages = 1,000,000 KEI = 100 KPI = 7.5
keyword phrase = red widget # times searched = 9,000 # resulting pages = 950,000 KEI = 85.26 KPI = 7.2
keyword phrase = blue widget # times searched = 8,000 # resulting pages = 120,000 KEI = 533.33 KPI = 7.3
keyword phrase = green widget # times searched = 7,900 # resulting pages = 900,000 KEI = 69.34 KPI = 4.2
keyword phrase = yellow widget # times searched = 6,300 # resulting pages = 994,000 KEI = 39.93 KPI = 5

Based on the results above you can see that to make it into the top 10 search engine results you will be competing with pages that have a PageRank averaging 7.3, which is a pretty high PageRank. On the other hand, if you choose green widgets you will be competing against pages with an average PageRank of 4.2. In this case, it would probably make more sense to target "green widgets".

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