Choosing Keywords That Pay

If you want to make money online, learning about keywords and other search engine optimization tactics is important. In order to sell something online, you need the people who are surfing the net to find your site. And because a user's search is most often keyword driven, it stands to reason that doing keyword research could give you a distinctive advantage which could result in your making more money.

The Key to E-Commerce Success - Getting Indexed in Search Engines

By being the site that people are directed to by Google, Bing, MSN, or some other search engine, when they key in a few words, you have a good chance of being able to try to woo that prospect into buying from you. Keywords aren't just used for search engines either. They're a factor in Google Adwords campaigns (those advertisements that you see under 'sponsored ads') and they are a factor in social Web 2.0 tools as well. Putting the right keywords in your text and in other areas of your website could help you.

How do you optimize for the right words and phrases?

It's not as simple as choosing to optimize for the word widget when it's widgets you sell. There might be 4000 other widget websites all vying for the same top spot on the search engines. That's where keyword techniques and where research tools can come in handy. Instead of fighting with a bunch of your competitors, you can set yourself apart in the crowd by narrowing down your niche.

There are a plethora of different strategies that can be used, including: long tail SEO, where you strategically use longer phrases that people actually use when searching as well as by targeting geographical areas with your website content. Instead of optimizing for 'widget', you could optimize for "best texas widget supplier." Now, you're narrowing down the competition and targeting people looking for a specific company to buy from.

Beyond Long tail SEO, you can optimize your text for more than just one keyword. You can add related words and phrases so that search engines who look for laterally related words in their indexing will see your site as highly relevant. There are also optimization techniques used to help you be more likely to rank for words that are very competitive.

So, how do you get started? There are quite a few free tools out there that can help you. Google Adwords users can log in to the Google tool and do some research before setting up an ad campaign. The problem here is that everyone else is using these tools too so that does take a bit of your edge away, especially if you're in a highly competitive niche. You can also subscribe to tools that offer to help you get additional info and provide you with secrets provide you with ranking and statistical information that the general public won't neccesarily have access to.

Whether you plan to use free tools or pay to get access to premium tools, spending time learning which words and phrases are most likely to help you gain a competitive advantage in the search engines can definitely help you be more successful online.