Google beat the analysts’ expectations again last week, releasing higher-than-expected earnings per share results.

This confirms once again that during a period of economic turmoil, people resort more to the online advertising medium because it provides more flexibility and more control over advertising programs. This is favorable to Google, with the majority of its business revenue coming from online advertisement.

And for credit crunch periods like the one we are in now, we have to note that this is especially favorable for companies with a large cash reserve, like the one in Google’s balance sheet. Google had $14.4 billion in cash at the end of September 2008.

But this acts not only in Google’s favor, but also in Microsoft’s. This is the time for these two companies to exercise their buying power to acquire companies with distressed cash flow.

I consider now to be an especially favorable time for Microsoft to raise again their proposal to acquire Yahoo! due to their distressed stock prices, and that a new offer no longer needs to be near to its original US$31 per share quoted at the beginning of this year. Just 10 months later, Microsoft could probably reach a deal for a much lower purchasing price. Although, many people believe that Microsoft is now interested primarily in the search technology of Yahoo! rather than the whole Yahoo! that includes many of its successful content sites. Perhaps Microsoft will only continue the discussion after the rumor regarding a merger between Yahoo! and AOL becomes reality.

Google cannot exercise the same tactic due to the anti-trust concerns of various governing bodies. The combined search market share could easily exceed 90% if Google merges with Yahoo. So this time Microsoft has an advantage over Google with the possibility of buying the whole or part of Yahoo!

Perhaps Yahoo! merging with AOL and selling its search technology to Microsoft is a better way out for Yahoo! shareholders. This frees them from the unfavorable market condition they have been enduring for the past few years. Considering their search technology is facing an uphill battle against Google, it is better for Yahoo! to remain focused on building content sites and leave the search business to the financially stronger Microsoft to continue developing (and hence battling with Google).

Do you any comments? Leave me message here.

Tags: Google’s quarter results, Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo!

Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, Google’s quarter results, Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo!

The social bookmarking phenomenon emerged several years ago as the trendy habit of people using free social bookmarking sites to categorize and manage their favorite webpages.

Traditionally, we resorted to the search engine’s internal classification system to handle your website’s themes. Search engines use the keywords on each webpage together with the keyword density to classify webpages by topic types. However, since search engines do not really understand webpages and keywords, they rely on statistical methods to classify your webpage according to their existing database of webpages with similar keywords.

Detecting when words are “similar” is easy for human beings. However, this is not an easy job for search engines, which are powered by computers. Computers do not understand synonyms that are different in spelling but similar in meaning. As I discussed in a previous post, several years ago Google acquired a company called Applied Semantics that attempts to handle this problem with its own invention, semantic technology.

Now the practice of “tagging” comes along to solve this problem. The best entity to determine a particular webpage’s classification is the webpage’s author, who is human being, fully understanding what the webpage s/he has written is about. Thus s/he “tags” it, using different words or sets of words to summarize the content of his/her website pages.

For example, since I am the author of this webpage, I can tag this it with keywords such as “social bookmarking”, “tag”, “tagging”, “Applied Semantics” or even some other related topics (such as social marketing sites “Technorati“, “de.licio.us”) that I think are the most important keywords related to this page. On the other hand, as viewed by a search engine, this webpage might be classified as “webpage” as this word appears most frequently in the article. Do you see the differences of machine versus human being?

At the same time, websites like Technorati and de.licio.us emerge as the mainstreams of so-called social bookmarking services as they allow users to register an account and bookmark their favorite websites with appropriate tags they themselves assigned to the webpages. They can even share their database with others (hence the term “social”). These bookmarking websites steadily emerge as a good source of “commentaries” and “classifications” of webpages in cyberspace. Some people further comment that the goal of tagging is not to classify, but to memorize.

It’s very logical that search engines will also consider the information from these bookmarking websites as a source of authoritative sites and webpages for particular popular keywords. This leads to the practice by some people of manipulating the social bookmarking websites (e.g., creating multiple user accounts to bookmark their own webpages with the carefully chosen tags as keywords) to artificially generate their own “popular” webpages within social bookmarking websites. Such people hope this will increase the search engines’ positioning of their webpages in search results.

An interesting book on this topic can be found here. This book teaches you how to use this tactic when blogging using popular website software like Wordpress, and actually reveals the drawback of referencing a webpage by tagging from the search engines’ perspective. This is because they are able to be manipulated by human beings, and so can create bias for a webpage.

The use of different variations of a keyword, such as “programme”, “program”, “programmes”, “programs” for the same concept can create a lot of confusion as well, creating additional problems with tagging.

One way to take advantage of this growing trend is to add a user-friendly component in your webpage to allow users to easily add your webpage to their favorite social bookmarking websites. If you take a look at the end of each post in my blog, you will see some lines of popular bookmarking websites like Del.icio.us, Spurl, Furl, Simpy, Blink, Digg, and those specializing in blogs like Technorati. Those lines allow my visitors to easily bookmark my webpage in their social bookmarking accounts. Someone coined the term “Social Media Optimization” (SMO), parallel to what we commonly referred to “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). But note that SMO also extends to Web 2.0 sites’ optimization such as Facebook.com, Myspace.com, etc. We’ll talk about this in a later post.

Tags: Social Media Optimisation, Web 2.0 Optimization, Social Bookmarking

Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, tagging, tags, tag, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Spurl, Furl, Simpy, Blink, Digg, Social Media Optimization, SMO, SEO, Social Media Optimisation, Web 2.0 Optimization, Social Bookmarking

Cuil.com, a new search engine launched two days ago, is set to be another competitor for Google in the web search industry.

What makes this search engine different from others is the profile of its founders. Most of them are ex-employees of Google, Inc.  In particular, one of the main architects of this new search engine, Anna Patterson, was an important contributor of Google’s present search algorithm.

Attracting a lot of curious traffic, Cuil.com’s launch experienced such high traffic that the site was periodically out of service the first day.

According to some news sources, Patterson left Google because of its refusal to try innovative changes to their search algorithm. Anderson’s own search technology was acquired by Google in 2004, when her search algorithm was incorporated into Google’s search engine. She left Google for a new venture, creating another search engine with the debut of its self-proclaimed innovative search algorithm.

Unlike Powerset, the natural-language search engine recently acquired by Microsoft, Cuil focuses its full effort on improving the cost and speed of indexing web pages (with its search algorithms remaining a mystery to us), hoping to return more relevant and powerful search results to web surfers than Google.

Upon my first few attempts, the only thing that impresses me so far is the format of its output pages. The magazine-styled output page tries to provide pictures together with the search pages’ content to enrich the user’s search experience. Though from what I can tell, the pictures provided by its search result pages are mostly extractions from the returned web pages, and some of those (as you can probably imagine) are really silly extractions that hardly accurately represent the web sites recommended.

Most importantly, Cuil.com fails to return web pages that I know are important for a particular search term. I conducted an interesting test using this search engine to search its own name, “cuil”, but none of the returned web pages even show the web site’s own link, http://www.curl.com!

Interestingly, if I use Google to search for the same term, it returns the related news about curl.com, and indeed the first search result is the search engine’s own hyperlink http://www.curl.com (Quite ridiculous, eh?)

Whether this search engine can establish a foothold in the search engine industry remains unknown. But what can be sure is that the emergence of a new search engine provides us with more search choices in quality web surfing, and that is truly beneficial to all of us.

To Google, perhaps this is also another push to improve its search algorithm to handle the new competition. That could be good. In fact, this view is shared by Google itself. An official of Google said they welcome the new search engine to the competition, since it drives them to provide even more superior service to its customers.

I have set up a new Google Alert to track the term “cuil.com” for any updated news about this search engine. Have you?

Tags: Curl, curl.com, Google, Anna Patterson, Powerset

Technorati Tags: Curl, curl.com, Google, Anna Patterson, Powerset

Using Google Alert to Boost your Online Marketing Effectiveness.

Google offers a free service called Google Alert that you should not miss. You can access this service here: http://www.google.com/alert

This service constantly searches for a particular search term that you provide, and returns to you any new updates it finds in cyberspace with this search term. You don’t have to keep going back and searching over and over yourself to find new items… the service does it for you!

For example, I can use the service to constantly search for the term “Damen Choy” to seek any webpages that come up with my name. The results are interesting. Sometimes I locate webmasters who have placed my articles in their directories. Sometimes I discover someone who has commented on my e-book (accessed here: http://www-a-better-job-interview.com). And I can follow up with these writers on those subjects related to me or my product/services to offer a joint-venture proposal, or explore other possible opportunities.

You can also use Google Alert to “spy” on your competitors’ ongoing activities by using their names as the search terms.

What is particularly exciting is that you can use Google Alert to grow your online business by using it to gain publicity. Here’s how.

Let’s say you’re a fitness trainer with a website for fitness-related resources. It’s a headache to get more people to learn about your website. With Google Alert, you can track newly posted news or stories about what is happening in the world of fitness. If something interesting is brought up by Google Alert, you can immediately contact the journalist who wrote the article and offer him your comments (usually a compliment to their story) along with your own website identity. Your compliment or comments may appear in the next story by the journalist. You can take it a step further by offering your e-book or articles to the journalist to demonstrate your skills in your particular field. Offer them the chance to interview you on the subject, or refer to your web resources in your next story. What’s important is to start a relationship with the journalists writing in your field. Relationship is actually the magic word behind the Public Relations industry. Did you know that?

Another way to use Google Alert to your benefit is to use it to search for particular headlines about your area of expertise. Once those headlines come up, you can write articles commenting on the subject from different angles, and then send them to your local media (both online and offline) for possible publication. Since your comments are related to breaking news hot off the press, the media will be more likely to respond to your comments and hopefully publish them.

I constantly use the Google Alert service to generate ideas for my blog writings. You know, it is not an easy job to find contemporary topics every day without this “tool” to help!

I even use it to track down anyone who has published my articles that I submitted to article directories (such as http://ezinearticles.com) by tracking the specially crafted article titles I submitted.

There is a paid service with similar functionality to Google Alert’s free service, but with more powerful deep crawling capability. It can return up to the top 750 searches related to your search term in the Google Search Engine. This service is not affiliated with Google, but it does help with more in-depth daily research for your search terms. If you’re interested, visit this link: http://www.GoogleAlert.com. They offer a free service with limited functionality so you can try it before joining the paid service.

Getting more publicity means getting more traffic and hence more revenue for your business. I hope this article helps. As always, feel free to write me with comments or questions!

Tags: online publicity, article tracking, online public relationship, PR, online PR building, GoogleAlert.com

Technorati Tags: Google Alert, online publicity, article tracking, online public relationship, PR, online PR building, GoogleAlert.com

Last Thursday, Yahoo announced the halt of discussions of a possible strategic partnership with Microsoft. The fallout of a Yahoo/Microsoft deal might be a piece of good news for Google. Right after ending talks with Microsoft, Yahoo announced a strategic advertisement pact with Google.

What makes me worry is that this new partnership may signify a possible monopoly of these two giants in online advertising, with Google controlling almost 70% of US search market and Yahoo, who comes in second place, controlling 17.4%¹. I fear that online advertisers may suffer from higher prices because of this near monopolistic partnership.

As I have said in the other posts, the average online ad rate of Google AdWords has increased significantly in the past few years. Take my experience as an example: my AdWords budget to achieve the same number of impressions for my advertisement has risen more than 400% in the past three years. The reason I keep using Google AdWords is there is no better alternative, unless you negotiate ad placements with other webmasters individually. However, this would require a lot of time and effort, and I’m quite sure the results would not be as satisfactory as what you can do with AdWords.

But it seems that in the short run, we have no alternative to this problem.

Microsoft will certainly oppose to the deal by escalating their objection to governing bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Directorate General for Competition of European Commission, asking them to deal with it on an anti-competitive behavior basis. But that process takes time and the results are uncertain.

The only one solution I can think of is buying Google stock (NASDAQ:GOOG) to “hedge” my financial pain of using Google AdWords.

¹http://searchengineland.com/071228-164103.php

Tags: Yahoo!, anti-competitive behavior of Google

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Google AdWords, Federal Trade Commission, Directorate General for Competition of European Commission, GOOG, Yahoo!, anti-competitive behavior of Google

I have noticed that Google has just released its Toolbar 5 BETA . In case you don’t know what a Google Toolbar is, it’s a function bar added to your browser (IE or Firefox) to make browsing the web more efficient and easier. In particular, I appreciate the Page Rank feature that helps me to determine a particular web page’s ranking in Google Search Engine.

You can get Toolbar 5 BETA here:

http://toolbar.google.com/T5/intl/en/

Read my post here about the two indispensable toolbars available to incorporate in your web browsing.

Currently, the Google Toolbar 5 BETA can only be installed with Internet Explorer. It offers the following additional features that may help you browse even smarter:

• A login feature allows you to use your customized toolbar setup at other computers.
• The new Google Notebook allows you to clip contents as you browse, working much like a scrapbook.
• A more customizable toolbar button feature allows you to add your favorite services like Google Map, Wikipedia, Google Finance, etc., so they are always at your fingertips for easier access.

So download the beta version now and enjoy web browsing!

Technorati Tags: Google Toolbar, Page Rank, Google Toolbar 5 BETA, Google Notebook

There are new search engines coming out every day using different algorithms to serve web surfers. Among them, a new breed of search engines is emerging, using so-called “natural language inputs” to activate searches.

The latest one noted is a search engine called Powerset (not an exciting name) developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Its purpose: “to build a search engine that could someday rival Google.”

Having typed in the URL of this search engine (http://www.powerset.com), my Firefox browser brings me to its entry page. A first glance of my Google Toolbar shows that its page rank is six. Not bad, eh?!

I decided to put the natural language search to the test, and typed in “I don’t know Albert Einstein.” It returned a list of related Wikipedia articles related to Albert Einstein. It seems that the search results ignored the words “I don’t know” in my search query and directly returned the “answers” to my “question.”

I tried the same search sentence in Google, and the search results were quite different. It returned many results containing the words “Albert Einstein”as well as “don’t know” trying to match what I was looking for. Essentially it returned “contextual” search results.

So which one is better?

Before we answer that question, let’s understand the working mechanism behind natural language technology. Natural language technology comes from a branch of computer science called Artificial Intelligence (AI) study.

I first became acquainted with AI while in college studying information engineering twenty years ago. At that time, we were very optimistic about the development of AI as we had the perception that the computer would replace every possible activity done by humans sooner or later by incorporating better information processing capability in programming. We studied neural network, voice recognition, word recognition, and robotic technology, hoping that one day we could build a computer that talks and thinks and acts like a human being.

Twenty years have passed, and computing scientists have made nothing similar to this hope, and are not even closer to the goal. Why? In my opinion, it’s because the basic computer architecture has not changed, and this is a great hindrance to making computers think like a human being.

Computers, from the time of their invention to now, inherit a basic architecture of memory, input, output, and a central processing unit. The central processing unit is designed to receive programming instructions and execute them linearly, one by one. It is not “thinking”, it is just “executing” a set of instructions.

A normal human being, having a brain containing more than 100 billion brain cells (neurons), each of them forming complex networks with each other with their dendrites, is much more powerful than even the most advanced computers in the world.

The brain’s complex network can function non-linearly in thinking. It allows us to have the intellectual processing power of imagination, association, feeling, emotion, and every kind of complex cognitive behaviour that is difficult for computers to imitate.

Among these capabilities, the power to associate things in order to build new knowledge is unprecedented. We humans don’t process information linearly, as a computer does. We process information non-linearly, by considering many inputs at the same time using our five senses and all the possible associations of knowledge and memory. If you have ever daydreamed before (and I’m quite sure you have), you will understand what I mean here. A tiny little trigger such as a special smell or a particular visual sight could propel your thoughts far from where you are or what you are doing.

Without this complex processing network we can hardly recognize a human face instantly, understand the subtle meaning of languages, or express a high level of emotional responses.

Unless a computer can totally revolutionalize its basic architecture to be more like a human brain, it can never approach these high-level cognitive activities that we humans are doing every day.

We do have research in this area, such as biological computer study - the study dealing with building a computer that can “learn” by using RNA duplication in micro-biology. Some newer studies also mention the use of nanotechnology to aid in this process. But we hardly have anything close to that reality now.

So I believe that, owing to the limitation of present computer architecture, we can hardly build a machine that can “talk” and “listen” like a three-year-old boy does. That means the aim to incorporate natural language capability in search queries is likely to fail.

If you try more search questions in Powerset, you will find that the results are not impressive at all. The fundamental drawback is the search results are rather unpredictable. We do not know what will be returned, and therefore cannot trust it to be consistent.

Unlike contextual search results, when you type in “I don’t know Albert Einstein”, you are quite sure the search engine will return search results containing these keywords. After all, the contextual search results are based on database technology, in which, within the past twenty years, we have gained a lot of improvement. And database technology is much more scalable in terms of capability to handle large volumes of data, whereas I am not sure if the natural language technology of Powerset is scalable or not. What will happen if it needs to process more and more data in the front end (natural language web surfers) and the back end (more and more data that it needs to use natural language technology to “understand”)? This is still unknown.

Google acquired Applied Semantics in 2003 to introduce the capability of handling better “interpretation”of what a webpage is about. I think this is a more straightforward approach, bringing in the natural language processing capability on the back-end to process with the indexed web pages in a search engine’s database. As I said in one of my 2006 posts about Applied Semantics (http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/41), this acquisition brings a revolutionary enhancement to a search engine’s web page ranking capability.

As for front-end, I think search engines should let the users decide the search words, and return what users are looking for. Perhaps this a more guaranteed and predictable way of serving web searchers.

Tags: AI, Natural Language Search Engine, Contextual Search Engine, human brain structure, neural network

Technorati Tags: Powerset, Palo Alto Research Center, natural language technology, Artificial Intelligence, neurons, dendrites, biological computer, Applied Semantics, AI, Natural Language Search Engine, Contextual Search Engine, human brain structure, neural network

If you run a blog or other type of website using content management software like I do, chances are you are using RSS to syndicate your updated data for your site visitors.

In the past, you’ve probably had a hard time tracking how many people have subscribed to your RSS feed, simply because there is no way you can do this easily. Visitors who have interest in your site can use the URL of your RSS feed and subscribe directly using their favorite feed management software. And you don’t have the slightest idea when they do this. Without them actively notifying you, there is no way you can collect subscription information to analyze the popularity of your feed.

If you have this headache, try the service offered by Feedburner here:

http://www.feedburner.com

Feedburner, which was acquired by Google last year, offers many enhancements to the original RSS Feed technology. My favorite feature is that it offers a way for RSS subscribers to receive your updated web content using email instead of the RSS feed. In this way, you can now allow site visitors to get updates of your website automatically via email when your website software registers a new piece of information on your website.

Take my blog as an example. At the right-hand side of this webpage, find the subscription box with heading “Get This Blog via Email.” This is the subscription box powered by Feedburner. If you enter your email address in the textbox there and press the subscribe button, your email address will be registered in the Feedburner for my website. You will immediately be sent a confirmation email to your email inbox. Upon clicking the confirmation link in that email, you are in!

From now on, whenever there is new update about this website, you will get a notification email. Of course, as in other common email subscription services, you can unsubscribe from this blog any time you want by clicking the subscription management link at the end of the notification emails. (By the way, if you haven’t already, why not take this chance to subscribe to this blog now? )

If you’re keen on managing the subscription status like me, you can replace your RSS Feed URL with the one offered by Feedburner. (For example, for this blog, my Feedburner RSS is http://feeds.feedburner.com/InternetMarketingJournal). When visitors subscribe to your RSS Feed using your particular Feedburner feed URL, this allows Feebburner to track your subscription status. It also helps to optimize your feed output to suit various RSS aggregators such as MY Yahoo!, MY AOL, Newsgator, Google Homepage, Google Reader, and others.

If you run your blog using WordPress or another popular content management software or service such as Blogger, Typepad, or MySpace, there is a quicker way to replace your original RSS Feed with Feedburner’s using various tailor-made plugins. You can find more information here:

http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/topic.py?topic=13055

Tags: RSS Feed Management, RSS Subscription by email

Technorati Tags: RSS, Feedburner, RSS aggregators, MY Yahoo!, Google Reader, WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, RSS Feed Management, RSS Subscription by email

The term keyword has become very popular in the world of Internet marketing. But what exactly is a keyword? At least in the Internet marketing context, the term refers to the words, phrases, or even sentences that you use on your website to describe your website, services, and/or products that you offer.

Why are keywords important? Because people are constantly looking for information when they surf the web by typing words or phrases into various search engines, ebook directories, download directories, and other search tools. These words and phrases are what you want to choose for your keywords, since this is how those search tools list you in their search results. The careful selection of keywords for your targeted services/products can be crucial to you on-line business.

For example, if you are setting up a website to sell scuba diving equipment (one of my favorite sports), how should you consider your competition? And how should you structure your website so that you can attract customers looking for scuba diving information on web?

I have found out a tool is very useful when I am choosing my keywords for scuba diving. You can find this tool at: http://www.imarketings.net/cgi-bin/c/click.cgi?id=10
Use this tool to generate helpful information about keywords you’re considering, and also to find highly effective niche keywords you might not have thought of on your own.

To use the information generated by this tool to its best advantage, let’s consider keywords from two aspects: the demand side and the supply side.

The Demand Side of the keywords

Here is a typical list generated by the tool when researching scuba diving:

You see? We have a list of 500 variations of the keywords!

Let me explain what all the numbers mean. The first number is the index, the second one is the number of times the keywords are searched in the search engines, and the third one is the predicted number of times the keywords would be searched for in a 24-hour period in all search engines.

So now you can get a good idea of what keywords regarding "scuba diving" you should target if you submit your websites to search engines, or what titles/names of the publication you should take for your newsletter, e-books and services. Choose keywords that are frequently searched by surfers and your chance of winning top positioning in search results will be higher. This takes into account the demand side of the keywords.

The Supply Side of the Keywords

But don't forget the competition. We have to look at whether those keywords are frequently used by other competitors. This is the supply aspect of choosing keywords.

By looking at the tool used above, the competition aspect shows up like this:

The first number is the index, the second one is the KEI Factor (explained later), the third one is the predicted number of searches in all search engines within a 24-hour period, and the fourth one is the number of sites that match this keyword description (where the competition is).

So you know that the keywords "Scuba diving" and "SCUBA DIVING" are predicted to be searched 11 times, but with 894000 competing sites. The chances are low for you to get high placement with this keyword since you’d have to struggle with those competing sites for top ranking.

But take a look at the first one in the list: "Nude Scuba Diving Pics." Notice that there are quite a number of searches for this phrase, but with no competing sites! (Although it should be related to adult content, and if you have no nude scuba diving pictures at your website, choosing this one might greatly disappoint people who come to your site looking for them!). How about "Scuba Diving Problems" on index eight? This could be a good keyword to target because it is predicted to be searched 18 times with a few sites competing.

So taking the time to go through this exercise will give you more ideas on what keywords to target. Target at least 30 keywords that have frequent searches, but with few competing sites. Then you can plan your search engine optimization strategy and the content building of your site, offering related services, books, forums, and more on your targeted business.

Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI)

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. It is a measure of how effective a keyword is "predicted" to be for your site, measured against three factors. First, let’s look at two of those factors:

1.  Popularity (P) of the Keyword, measures how many searches occur for the keyword, as previously discussed in the demand side above.

2. Competitions (C) of the Keywords, measures how many sites are competing using the same keyword, as discussed in the supply side above.

Based on the above two considerations, the KEI is calculated as follows:

P divided by C = P/C = KEI
where P = popularity, and C = competition as stated above.

However, there is one more factor to take into consideration: 

3.  If both the popularity and the number of competitions increase at the same rate, the P/C ratio should remain the same. However, a more popular keyword should be more preferred if we assume that the increase in the difficulty of gaining top positioning in a keyword list is compensated by a higher number of people searching for that keyword.

Therefore, we multiply the ratio P / C by P again, to create the new formula:

P x P / C = KEI

putting more weight on the popularity of the keywords. The final formula is expressed as:

"The Square of P divided by C"
or
P² / C = KEI

You might be asking, why not "The cube of P divided by C?” Why not use an even higher order of P divided by C? Yes, you can customize your own KEI factor calculation by varying the power of P. The higher power of P indicates even more emphasis on the popularity of the keyword. If you are especially confident that you can achieve a higher position in the search ranking despite high competition among the keywords chosen because of the keyword’s very high popularity, then a higher power of P may be justified.

However, in the tool we discussed previously, as a rule they use the generally accepted Square of P for their results.

So now you should have a good idea of how to choose keywords with a high KEI. It is recommended to use keywords with KEI greater than 10, and the very best are those with a KEI above 100.

Let’s consider again the list shown previously:

You can see that you should choose those keywords such as:"pro gear scuba diving mask",
"Pictures Of People Scuba Diving"
Ones that catch my eye are "scuba diving clipart," "scuba diving jobs," and "scuba diving pictures."

The KEI was invented by Sumantra Roy. Subscribe to his "The 1st Search Ranking Newsletter" by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/newsletter.htm

The Concept of Keyword Density

Keyword density is the ratio of the number of times keywords appear in your webpage to the total number of words in your webpage.

Most search engines consider the keyword density in determining each website’s ranking in search results. So if two web pages are competing with the same keywords in a search engine ranking, the one with higher keyword density is likely to have added advantages.

Of course, there are many other factors affecting the ranking results. But at least when creating your "doorway" pages, consider this factor. Try to repeat your keywords often throughout your content.

So are you getting a better idea of how to use keywords in your website content? Here are some on-line resources that you can use to check the keyword density in your webpage:

http://www.webjectives.com/keyword.htm
http://www.keyworddensity.com/

You can also find out more by searching for "keyword density" using Google.

By the way, don’t miss out on this relevant post about keyword semantics here: http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/41/

And this one about keyword density: http://www.imarketings.net/internetmarketing/31

Tags: Keyword Research SEO On-page Optimisation

Technorati Tags: KEI, Keyword Effectiveness Index, Sumantra Roy, Keyword density, keywords, keyword semantics, Keyword Research, SEO, On-page Optimisation