Once you’ve selected your keywords in WordTracker, you’re taken to a page that gives you more detailed information on your search. Specifically, you get information on KEI Analysis, Count, 24Hrs and Competing. Each of these will be discussed separately.

KEI Analysis

KEI Analysis stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index and is basically a ratio between the number of times a keyword appears in WordTracker’s database and the number of competing web pages that use that keyword. The KEI will increase as the popularity of the keyword increases. Similarly, KEI will decrease as it has more competition, i.e., as more sites are using it. A high KEI means that your keyword is more popular and has less competition, which means you have a better chance of getting to the top.

Count

Count refers to the number of times a keyword appears in the WordTracker database. WordTracker gets their results from Metacrawler and Dogpile, both of which are metacrawlers that search the results of the major search engines.

24Hrs

The number in the 24Hrs column is an estimate of how many times people will search for that particular keyword in the search engine the results are posted for. Since I was just using the free trial, I was only given results for MSN. However, if you subscribe to WordTracker, all the major search engines are covered.

Competing

The number in the Competing column represents the number of web pages that also contain that keyword. The lower this number is, the better chance you will have of a high ranking in the search engines.

Using these figures together – and especially the KEI – can help you choose effective keywords for your niche. In general, a KEI between 10 and 100 is considered a good one to use, below 10 is a poor choice and above 100 is excellent.

I had chosen 17 keywords and my highest KEI was 1.659 for the keyword “depression”. Doesn’t look real promising. However, if I ran another search trying to drill down some, my results might be different. For example, if I were living in Atlanta, feeling depressed and looking for a therapist, I wouldn’t just type in “depression”. I might type “depression Atlanta psychologist” or something like that. In any event, WordTracker does seem to deliver a lot of useful data for choosing keywords.