The Search for the perfect keyword!

When picking a keyword to go after in the search engines what are the minimum keyword searches per day that you will pursue for one keyword?

A keyword with less than 100?
More than 100?
More than 1000?
More than 10,000? etc..

 

the conversion rate is more important, and what your getting back for it i.e. $
and competition dictates everything, the more searches usually just means more competition

 

There are two datapoints you need (at least).

1. The number of searches per day (I like over 1,000), and
2. The number of results returned (I prefer under 1,000,000)

 

I don't understand? How do you find out the conversion rate without first ranking for the keyword?

 

hi
what i meant was high traffic levels dont neccesarily result in conversions , (or sales) you need 'keywords" or whatever that people are "looking to buy" as oppossed to "searching" for, this is just my pennies worth, but volume of traffic means nothing unless theyre going to buy something, if you find these, not neccesarily "buying" terms, but near enough, then do what mister tut says and see what competition there is, and see what you need to do to get to the top.
there are a lot of people searching for "free" but the chances of selling something to someone who is searching for this are very small.
about the last line mark5022 , you could be ranking on msn within a few weeks of putting your site up,if youve got links pointing towards your site, and see from the stats and conversions what the conversion rate is, then take it from there.
the more searches on a keyword the more competition there will be so you will have to do a lot more to get to the top, there are a few tools available to show what mister tut is talking about but i cant remember them, i dont know if anyone else here has links where they are ?
find some smaller keywords that people are looking to "buy" something and target your traffic/website towards these keywords.
just my pennies worth

 

Better yet, would be a keyword with a high KEI. In a nutshell, a keyword that gets a lot of queries, but does not have a lot of sites competing for it

 

Yeah, that's what i was getting at, but I don't like to use that term because nobody recognizes it, and I don't know what the "e" stands for!

 

maybe its "exasperated"
i saw some tools that demonstrate what mr tut is saying , tools that show the 1. The number of searches per day
2. The number of results returned

and compares the 2, i dont know if it was wordtracker, but the search term suggestion tool on this site is handy.
then see whats competing for each term etc

 

Wow! Thanks for all the help and good info.

 

Choose a keyword with high margins and competition.

Even scraping the bottom of the barel for high commision terms can make a fair amount of cash.

 

There is no minimum. If you are trying to rank for an affiliate deal with the merchant selling vintage stradivarius violins at 30% commission you only need one sale to be off to the Bahamas. Little traffic is needed as long as it's targeted.

If you sell nails per singles and invest 100K in a nails e-commerce shop and you make 2cts a nail, you will need loads of traffic.

Like with all these questions...

IT DEPENDS!

 

I think that's the point I was *trying* to make...

 

I do what Mr. Tut suggests. I use the keyword suggestion tool on this site, which is based on wordtracker (and overture) results. (I use the wordttracker results only; the overture results tend to be inflated). I plug the keywords found into google. I divide the number of pages returned by the number of searches found under wordtracker. The lower the number, the less competitive the word.

I don't bother with keywords that aren't searched more than 100 times per day, or with keywords that have a page/search ratio in the hundreds. Ideally, finding one that is searched 1000/day, with low ratio. BTW - anyone have an idea of what constitutes a truly "good" ratio (I presume a good "KEI," in actual number - i.e., under 30, under 10, etc., based on empirical or theoretical analysis?

Nichebot does this, although I've not tried the tool.

 

nichebot

that was the one i was thinking of