SEO Glossary - Keyword Research

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KEI

means Keyword Effectiveness Index. Measuring and comparing the demand for your keyword (Monthly World Searches) against the number of web pages that contain it (Competition) is a helpful approach to pick out the best keywords. The KEI will give an idea of how important a specific keyword is. The formula, KEI = (MS^2/C) = (MS/C * MS), where MS is for the number of monthly world searches and C is for the competition. The KEI range goes from 0 to over 400: 0 - 10 = Poor keyword; 10 - 100 = Good Keyword; 100 - 400+ = Excellent Keyword. Keywords with the highest KEI combine high popularity and low competition.

Key Phrase

a group of keywords which appear in the content of a web page. A good SEO will make sure that a page is optimized for the targeted search terms while still providing useful and informative copy for the user. "Key phrase" is often (incorrectly) used interchangeably with "search term".

Key Phrase Search

a search for documents containing an exact sentence or phrase specified by a user in a search engine text box.

Keyword

a specific word or combination of words entered into a search engine that results in a list of pages related to the keyword. A keyword is the content of a search engine query.

Keyword Density

the number of keywords on a page compared to the total number of words expressed as percentage. Density is calculated as the number of words in a key phrase multiplied by the frequency and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword).

Keyword Domain Name

the use of keywords as part of the URL to a website. Positioning is improved on some search engines when keywords are reinforced in the URL.

Keyword Frequency

how often a keyword appears on a page or page area. In general, the higher the number of times a keyword appears on a page, the higher its search engine ranking. However, repeating a keyword too often on a page can lead to that page being penalized for spamming.

Keyword Monitoring

when keyword monitoring is wanted, the monitoring center will download your page (200 Kb max.) using a GET/page name.html command.

Keyword Nesting

placing one keyword or keyword phrase inside a broader keyword term.

Keyword Phrase

Please refer to Key Phrase

Keyword Prominence

how close to the start of a page area a keyword appears. In general, having a keyword closer to the start of an area will lead to an improvement in the search engine ranking of a page.

Keyword Research

in SEO, the process of finding the keywords or keyword phrases customers use to find a product or a service.

Keyword Search

a search for documents containing one or more words specified by a user in a search engine text box.

Keyword Spamming

the process of repeating keywords or key phrases in meta tags and body text. This can result in keyword density over 50% and is seen as spam by most search engines.

Keyword Stuffing

the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the "benefit" of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of the search engine's Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.

Keyword Theme

a group of keywords or key phrases which appear in the content of a web page.

Keyword Weight

the number of times a keyword appears on a page as a percentage of all the other words on the page.

Misspellings

people quite often spell words incorrectly when using search engines. Pages which use common misspellings will quite often receive extra hits, so it is a useful technique to include common misspellings of words in alt tags, keywords, page names and titles. A similar effect occurs when spaces are missed out and words are accidentally joined together. Often, intelligent marketers will also optimize sites for misspellings in order to capture this sort of traffic.

Negative Keyword

allows you to eliminate searches that you know are not related to your message. If you add the negative keyword "vacation" to your keyword "Hawaii climate" your ad will not appear when a user searches on "vacation Hawaii climate". Negative keywords should be used with caution, as they can eliminate a large portion of a desired audience if applied incorrectly.

Phrase Match

your ad appears when users search on the exact phrase and also when their search contains additional terms as long the keyword phrase is in exactly the same order. A phrase match for "web promotion" would include "web promotion software". In the case of one word keywords, there's no difference between a broad match and a phrase match.

Proximity

how close keywords that make up your key phrase are to each other. You should try to use your keyword combination as a unit, keeping your keywords together. In other cases try to put your keywords as close together as possible and make sure your sentences are clear. Keyword proximity is used by some engines, such as Google, as a part of their ranking formulas.