The keywords once finalized, as in level one of DOM, need to be ranked so that they can be implemented across the web site. For doing so, we will first need to understand their relative popularity & then find appropriate places to target them.

Since, Google is the most popular and has the largest market share over the web. It is natural for us to test the keywords for its popularity and competitiveness on Google and other major search engines.

The data given below clearly suggests that Google has the largest piece of the pie of search market share. The figures reflect the share of searches received by the search engines.

Search Engine Market Share:

• Google - 48%
• Yahoo - 32%
• MSN Search - 16%
• Ask - 2%
• Others - 2%

Source: comScore Media Matrix Search Engine Ratings, December 2004

Now the million-dollar question is that what should be the optimum way to measure the keyword popularity? And how to use Google to assess for keyword popularity?

Unfortunately, Google is not very forthcoming on these figures. However, there is an indirect way. We can always make an estimation based on the number of pages returned on Google blue toolbar for any search term. The more the pages returned, the more generic is the search & hence more the likelihood of its getting searched.

However, this tale has one twist.

If this theory is true than one letter words should be the most searched words, as they will return the highest number of pages. For example:

• News: 1,670,000,000
• Product: 560,000,000
• Security: 710,000,000

However, it is unlikely that these words are being used by searchers to obtain any relevant information.

Let us expand this search further. We ran a search to compare results for Google to understand the relative frequency of searches for two – word keyphrases.

• Online promotion: 30,000,000
• Search engines: 46,300,000
• Web designer: 31,000,000
• Cartoon network: 4,890,000
• Advertising agency: 20,000,000

• Advertising agency USA: 3,220,000
• Cartoon network channel: 768,000
• Web designer Michigan: 11,700,000
• Search engine marketing: 29,400,000

Online promotion consultant 2,360,000 (Incidentally our website http://www.mosaic-service.com is at No 1 spot for this).

With this data available, we employ DOM to make an evaluation, as to which out of these, will be more fiercely fought rankings.