Search Engine Optimization 101
Keyword Market Analysis

What is a Keyword Market?
In short, a Keyword Market is the total number of unique searches on the Internet that are relevant to your website. A Keyword Market is defined by the top-level or root keyword that is generally most relevant to your business. If you own a shoe store, "shoes" might be the top-level keyword for your market. "Shoes" of course is very general since there are many kinds of shoes for men and women. Top-level keywords may contain thousands of vertical keyword markets. Initial analysis on "shoes" will produce hundreds of verticals (running shoes, nike shoes, bridal shoes, golf shoes, etc.)

Understanding Your Keyword Market
Selecting the right keywords and phrases is critical to the success of any search engine marketing campaign. A thorough analysis of your keyword market(s) will ensure proper keyword selection.

Analysis involves the following:

Comprehensive Vertical and Lateral Keyword Analysis
Vertical and lateral keyword analysis refers to the discovery process you can go through to determine which Keyword Markets are relevant to your website. A vertical analysis looks at all forms of the word (singular, plural) and all the popular variations that are used in combination as a keyword phrase. A lateral analysis queries hundreds of other websites that deal with similar markets and extracts those keywords from the title tags, META tags and body text. The most frequent keywords end up at the top. Example is the best way to explain vertical and lateral keyword analysis. Let's take the keyword search "basketball" as an example:

Qualify relevant keywords for target audience
Qualifying keywords before making a final decision is where expert subjectivity is applied to catch what the technology cannot. After conducting a comprehensive vertical and lateral keyword analysis, we are left with an exhaustive list of keywords.

Most will be relevant to your site, but many will not be. It is important to remember that these keywords represent actual searches made by actual people. Qualifying for relevant keywords involves a thorough review of your keyword market and making sure all of the keyword searches are reflective of your target audience.

Total Keyword Popularity and Competing URLs
It is important to make an evaluation of how popular a keyword is (i.e. how many times is a keyword predicted to be searched in a 24 hour period) and how it's popularity compares with the total number of competing URLs (other sites that are returned by the search engines for the same keyword searches). An analysis of this relationship will tell us where it is smart to optimize and where it is foolish.

The results of this analysis is cross referenced with your website content to determine the right page selections for optimization.

Resources:

• WordTracker