When we talk about ranking in search engines, we are indeed talking about ranking for a particular key word of key phases in the search engines. One problem webmasters may find is that it is difficult to determine the key words for their web pages. For example, if you have a website selling books, you can take either book store or book shop as your keyword. In fact, choosing a suitable key phase should be done by some strategy but not your instincts. You should never choose the key words by merely guessing.

The question now is how to determine the best key words for your web pages. Without any surprise, the best key words will be words that have a large search volume but little competitions. Here are some ways to search for such key words.

Using Word Tracker

You can use word tracker to help you to search for the best keyword. The data in word tracker is based on the data from msn.com. You can pre-define some key phases and then submit to word tracker. It will in turn give you an index which shows the ratio between search volume and competition. As a result you will be able to find the best key words or phases for your websites.

Estimating Yourself

If you do not want to pay and want to get a free solution to the problem, you may estimate the ratio discussed in the previous section yourself. You can use the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool to get an estimation of the search volume of a key phase. You will then take a search of that key phase in Google. In Goolge, you will get the total number of search results. Then you can just simply calculate the ratio between the search volume and the competitions. Of course you may find it a bit strange since you are collecting data from two different databases, namely Yahoo and Google. There is no doubt that it will be better to have data from a single source but it will be good enough as an estimation.

You may think that it is so easy to determine the quality of the keyword. However, this estimations and ratios are not without problem. In fact, the idea of this ratio assumes that there is no difference in order to get from a rank of 4000 to 2000 and from 2000 to the first place. This is not the reality, however. Normally it will be more difficult to get to the first rank. As a result, you will also need to analyze your competitors on the search engines. You need to study the websites which get the highest places for your key phases so that you will get a whole picture of the key phases your have chosen.