If all this Make Money Online stuff is like a foreign language for you, you’re probably wondering – What are Keywords?
If you’re new to the world of blogging or building a website you might not have ever come across the term. Keywords are “search terms” or “queries” typed into a form in a search engine.
As with every discipline, there is always terminology to learn and this is, by far, is the most important term in the world of the internet – Keywords!
Everything you do, when building a blog or website, will be determined by the keywords you use and how well you can anticipate how people search for them.
How people search for stuff on the web is a behaviour all marketers are keen to know, understand, and anticipate. So, now you know what keywords are, let’s delve into how people use them.
There are many useful free webmaster and seo tools available online but if you don’t know what the basic inputs are – the keywords used by people to find things online, they’re useless.
Keywords are crucial because people plug them into search engines when they want answers to their queries. Understanding how to research types of search behaviour can unlock traffic patterns on the world wide web.
Your keyword research is one of the most important activities you will do.
Even if you did not know what keywords are, you probably have used them every day when you search for something online.
Search Behaviour
If you are looking for dog food on the internet, your keyword or search term is “dog food”. You don’t want to search for “dog” or for “food”, you want “dog food”. This is the first time you’ll narrow your focus, and as you search you’ll even narrow it more and more to drill down to where you can find exactly what you are trying to find.
If you explore google, you will find many different ways to narrow your search for dog food by using different methods. Give it a shot. Input dog food into the search form and see what happens!
You can easily see the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) returned almost 8.5 million pages. The search term is broad and the results include everything related to dog and food. However, the search engine determines the listing order by what “it considers to be” Most Relevant to Least Relevant according to each engines’ algorithm. More about this later. Relevance is what we’re interested in at the moment.
If you enclose your search term, or keyword, in quotation marks you’ll drop over a million results narrowing your search.
You’ll also notice the listing order will have changed. Now here is where understanding keywords and how people search is important. Let’s say you are only interested in dog food for german shepherds. You may alter your query or search with the term included in quotations. We’ll try it both ways to see the differences.
1 – Broad Match Search
Now we’re down to just over half a million. Can you guess what the results will be when we enclose the long tail keyword in quotation marks? One hundred thousand maybe? Ah! We’ll give it a whirl!
2 – Phrase Match Search
Wow. Now we’re down to only 215 sites that are listed in Google for “dog food for german shepherds”.
I know that for an experienced webmaster or Internet Marketer this is as basic as it gets. If you are just learning, it is essential that you understand the dynamic shown here. This little exercise exposes niches where the competition dwindles away. It can show you opportunities where you can succeed.
Online marketers target very different traffic. The most valuable traffic on the internet differs depending on what you want the traffic to do when they get to your site. Before you dive in and throw up a website or blog you had better understand who your ideal customer is going to be. The ONLY way to do it is to think and SEARCH like they do.
What are keywords? They are your roadmap to success if you want to make money online. They are the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything you do on the internet.
When you can anticipate what your customer wants and how they search for it, you will be able to target the customer that will make you money over and over again. To be successful with a website or a blog you have to convert your traffic into cash!
When I am searching the web for something I want, I try as hard as possible to eliminate the junk. And guess what? There is a lot of junk. I don’t want to go to a site where there is no focus on the stuff I want.
So, if you have an idea of what you want to market online, you have to learn how to research keywords. After you understand how to do keyword research, the first step is to develop a massive list of keywords that apply to your site concept. There are many tools online to help you do this and some are very expensive and some are free. Yup. Free! You got it.
Google provides a Keyword Tool for web-masters that is free and invaluable when you are starting out. Go there and use it. Google makes it easy to export your keywords to a spreadsheet in a .csv file. You’ll need a spreadsheet package so you can store and analyze the data you collect. There are free open source spreadsheets online or you can use Excel for Windows or Macintosh or iWork for Mac. Pick your poison.
Use the Google Keyword Tool to discover everything you can about your topic. Using keywords correctly will help you with everything you do online. You can Make Money With Adsense by using the correct keywords and you can target relevant search terms to increase Affiliate Sales.
The correctly chosen keywords will drive the people who are interested in the content on your site. Keywords are the Road Signs on the Internet Highway!
Don’t forget to go through the exercise we did above to drill down to where you can understand the patterns. Even though your initial concept may be broad with a lot of competition, there will be niches that you can conquer. It’s up to you to find them before you commit yourself to any idea.
If you want to learn how to make money on the Internet, a clear understanding of keywords and the effect they will have on how you build your online presence will guide you to a brilliant future if followed correctly.
Stay Tuned
Jim
Learn How To Make Money Online!
A Step-by-Step Blueprint for Creating Low Maintenance Income Online
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