How do you work out KEI ?

[Frank Orman]

I am using the Keyword Discovery tool and find that the resultant KEI is very strange. It does not make sense that a keyword with a decent number of searches and almost no competitors has a KEI of 0.

Does anyone know what the relationship is between searches and occurences that generates the KEI number for KD?

Alternatively, using the search and occurence numbers that KD gives, does anyone have a formula that I can use to generate my own KEI number?

[ChrisWebPub]

What formula are you using that is producing a 0, there are many ways to calculate KEI and without knowing how you are doing it it cannot be troubleshooted.

I do it by checking wordtracker to get popularity numbers, and then I just check Google results and make a judgement call based on my experience as to the difficulty. I don't actually plot out KEI's anymore as I do not need them to aide my decision making.

If I had to pick a metric to use to measure difficulty it would not be results returned, as word commonality has little to do with the competitive optimization environment. I'd use PageRank or SEOmoz's PageStrength (which is meaningless for almost everything, but a neat tool and a decent judge of optimization difficulty, if nothing else).

[Zhoog]

The simplest formula for KEI is searchvolume/competitors, where a higher number is better value.
Some use searchvolume^2/competitors

and even other throw in logarithms. Doesn't really matter as long as you understand how it's being calculated.

On another note: some people only use the allintitle or allinanchor in google to get the 'real' competitors. A good thing to do for your main keywords, but pobably not for your sub-keywords.

[phoebe]

As far as i know KEI is calculated as follows:

(count ^ 1/3 * eng_weight * pos_weight ) / 10,000

count = Number of sites found by the given keyword by the search engine
eng_weight = Engine weight, weight of a search engine you have set in the "Score" tab
pos_weight = Position weight, weight of a position you have set in the "Score" tab

[jasonpilbin]

popularity: 500, 1000 (can be searches per month or day)
competitors: 10000, 10000 (make sure to put your word inside quotes to check this on google, do NOT just type it in)

500 * 500 / 10000 = 25
1000 * 1000 / 10000 = 100

if you want weight/dampening etc:

500 * 500 / 10000 / (0.5/0.5) = 25
500 * 500 / 10000 / (0.5/0.6) = 30

500 * 500 / 10000 / (0.5/0.4) = 20
500 * 500 / 10000 / (0.6/0.5) = 20.83

[brainch]

i think it's hard to select key words , if you pick up a hot word , your new site never can go up to first page .