How to choose Good Keywords

When you perform any kind of search in the keyword universe, you can now dig down to the next level. E.g. search for 'gambling'. Then, when you click on 'online gambling', just the results for 'online gambling' come up, click on 'online gambling in states' and so on.

What Is Exact Search?

Exact match searching means that a search engine searches for only those sites which use the keyword exactly as typed in by the user.

What Is Partial Search?

Partial match search means that a search engine also searches for sites which contain the individual words of the keyword but not necessarily occurring together or in the order typed in by the user.

Most people don't know about wrapping the keywords in quotes to search on the exact phrase. Also, in most search engines you need to go out of your way to use any advanced search options such as exact phrasing - and since it's more work, far fewer people will do it - let alone even understand it. So why is this the default? Shouldn't you turn the quotes off?

This is a common misconception. Whether a user enters a term inside quotes or not is actually irrelevant. The only time we need to know about the users is when we want to know how many times they search for a particular keyword or keyphrase. But you aren't competing against users for top placement, you are competing with other web sites that are already indexed. This is the all important difference.

To give an example, if you are trying to rank highly on 'chicago real estate', you are not competing with web sites that have incorporated 'partial match searching' into their pages: e.g. meta name="keywords" content="chicago, florida, real, estate" you are competing with web sites that have incorporated 'exact match searching' into their pages: e.g. meta name="keywords" content="chicago real estate, florida real estate."

Notice the placement of the commas in the examples above. In partial match searching, there is a comma after each word. In the exact match example, the comma comes after each keyword phrase.

If a user requests 'florida real estate', search engines will return pages indexed by exact matches (pages with chicago real estate, florida real estate) above pages indexed by partial matches (pages with chicago, florida, real, estate).

Here's another example. If a user enters 'quiz shows online', search engines will usually look for pages that have been indexed with 'quiz shows online, quiz shows, quiz shows today ...' above those with 'quiz, shows, online, today'.

This is why we default to using quotes (exact match searching) when querying the engines for competing web pages. It gives a truer representation of your competition. Now you have enough information to spot niches in MSN. All the other engines are available in the full version.

What does it all mean? This is where you spot your niches in MSN. The figure you want to take note of is the 'KEI Analysis'. The higher this figure, the more popular your keyword is and the less competition it has. This generally means that you will find it easier to reach the top of this keyword.