One of the most important things you can do for your Internet marketing business is to come up with appropriate keywords. It takes some time to find them, but the time spent will be well worth the effort. Keywords are what matter to search engines and the better you are at coming up with the right ones, the better your Internet marketing site will rank in the search results.
Overture used to be a great and fast tool for finding keywords, but it’s no longer a good tool to use for something so important. Though the site is still operational, it hasn’t been updated since January 2007, so the statistics aren’t as current as you want them to be when choosing keywords to pilot your site.
Another tool that works quite well is SEO Book’s Keyword Selection Tool at http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ . What makes the site special is it’s comprehensiveness. Not only do you get results from the three big search engines, but you can get information on trends, a traffic estimator, and more. The only drawback is that it has become quite popular, and like Overture was in the past, it might be busy; so if you submit a very general term into the tool, you may see 0 results. Try again in a few minutes. That doesn’t mean the tool found no results for your term. It just means that it’s too busy.
But that’s the first thing you should do. Submit a very general term for your niche to begin. Let’s say you’re in the cats niche. You sell cat grooming tools, cat food, etc. So, the first thing you want to plug into any keyword selection tool, whether you use WordTracker, SEO Book, or something else, would be the term “cats.” SEO Book came back with “cat” at the top of the list, with 2,014,002 searches for the month. That includes Google, Yahoo, and MSN searches. That’s a lot of searches! And what it means is that the term is much too competitive. You could optimize for “cat” and pump out articles until you were blue in the face, but you might still not rank for the term “cat.” So, travel down the list a bit…
We have “cat food,” which is one of your imaginary products at 33,926 searches. Still competitive, but not impossible. That would probably be a good keyword for you to use. But there’s also “cat video” at 26,324 searches. Great! Anything with more than 10,000 searches that’s not up at the top of the list will probably work out well for your Internet marketing business. If you optimize your page with those terms and send out articles, blog entries, etc. using the same terms as your keywords you’ll probably rank over time
Choosing the right keywords is critical for your Internet marketing business, if you want to get free search engine traffic. Find keywords that apply to your niche, but stay away from the most competitive terms until you have some search engine traction, such as a Google page rank of 4 or higher. Then, as your site matures, you’ve got lots of articles and blog entries pointing back to it, using the keywords that you chose to begin. Then, start going for the bigger game and keep ratcheting up the ante. By then, you’ll have the status you need to do it. Just remember that search engine optimization is like a garden that needs constant attention. But, if you work it carefully, it can definitely produce a lot of lettuce.
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Nichebot is my favorite tool for this. It’s cheap and gets the job done.
Good keywords are per definition those words representing the business of your site. Most people beleve good keywords are those words which are the most popular. In addition do not forget the ‘long tail” better to have 20 out of 100 vistors then 5 out of 300.
Cheers, John.
I never noticed that change to the terms and conditions. It’s a good job you’re on the ball as it’s easy to get caught out by stuff like that. Thanks so much – Richard
I would like to than the owners of this site.it has lots of good information and i hope that i can contribute to it on a daily basis.thanks and keep it up
Nichebot is my favorite tool for this. It’s cheap and gets the job done.