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Keywords

Keywords are the force behind search engine marketing.  When you want to find a donut shop in Provo, Utah you type “donut shop provo” into Google, Yahoo!, or your search engine of choice.  The average donut-searching citizen doesn’t think of these as keywords; in fact, they may have no idea what these are called.  But the online marketer knows how to reverse-engineer these user-generated search terms, and how to finesse them to his or her advantage.

So, if the search engine marketer learns that a certain keyword is cheap and brings in lots of clicks, the marketer can develop products that satisfy that search term.

Understanding how keywords work is essential to becoming a successful online marketer.

Keywords 101

Keywords Drive Traffic

From the perspective of a person using a search engine, a keyword is the word or words that you type into the search form.

Each niche has many keywords.  So while it may be obvious that the keyword for single-cup coffeemakers is…well, single-cup coffeemakers…that’s only part of the story.  Sure, you’ll include that as a keyword, but there are hundreds of other related keywords.

Don’t Set Up Your Domain Yet

You’re excited about your new niche.  It’s bold, it’s fresh, it’ll change the world.  Right?  You want proof-positive of your place in the world.  You’ve chosen plasma tv’s as you niche, and you’re itching, aching, burning to see www.PlasmaTVWorld.com in hard cold type–or at least, on the screen.

The reason you’re not setting up your website’s domain yet that by researching keywords, you will learn more about your niche.  Consequently, you will learn better what your domain name should be.  If you don’t quite understand this yet, it’s fine.  It’ll become clear in the next lesson on registering domains.

You Do Not Know Your Niche’s Keywords

When I started search engine marketing, I was so dumb that I thought I could come up with keywords off the top of my head.  I even had one niche that I knew intimately from other walks in life, so I thought that I was qualified above anyone else to come up with keywords.  Wrong.  What you know about a niche is completely independent from what people really search for.

You need a keyword generator.  With a keyword generator, you type in your key phrase or niche.  In this case it’s heelies.  You press and button and the keyword generator finds all the keywords that people have searched for in the past surrounding what you typed in.

The Problem With Free Keyword Generators

The premier keyword generator is WordTracker.  WordTracker is quite good, but it’s subscription-based and I can’t afford it.  At the other end of the scale are free keyword generators.  The DigitalPoint forums, Aaron Walls’ SEO Book, Google AdWords:  they all have free keyword generators.  Heck, search “free keyword generator” on Google and you’ll find any number of them.

The problem?  They are difficult to use.  For the most part, you cannot export large numbers of keywords.  I have spent so many hours of my life trying to make free keyword generators work for large numbers of keywords (and yes, you will need large numbers).  I have cut and pasted and cleaned up the results until I was blue in the face.

So the thing to do is buy a keyword generator that is desktop-based, not web- and subscription-based.  You want it to be a one-time purchase, not something you will be paying for month after month your whole life.  This was really a big issue for me, so I researched all my options and settled on Keyword Elite.