Internet Marketing Tips: How To Find Profitable Keywords In 3 Easy Steps
By Titus Hoskins
Each day I go on the hunt for profitable keywords for my sites. I have been doing this daily task for years and have come to enjoy the simple steps I take to find profitable keywords. It has become so enjoyable because I know with each valuable I find I am adding hundreds, sometimes even thousands to my yearly online income.
Keywords power much of the online traffic and commerce on the web. Keywords are the exact word or phrase surfers type into search engines to find what they're looking for on the Internet. They are the essential elements in your website's profitability and in many cases keywords will largely determine how much revenue you earn from the web.
Finding profitable keywords is not a difficult task, anyone can use popular online sites and tools to find valuable and profitable keywords with a few minutes of work. Quick, easy and simple. You just have to know how to find the answers to these three questions:
1. How Many Searches Are Made Each Month For Your Keyword?
A that receives no searches is worthless. A which receives just 10 to 100 searches each month may be very profitable. Your first task is to find out or discover HOW MANY SEARCHES are made each month for your or phrase. You can use sites like Overture (Yahoo Marketing) or WordTracker and they will give you the number of searches made each month and also variations of your phrase. For quick reference I use this site: http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/
Once you know how many searches are made for your you can determine how much traffic you will receive if your site lands on the first page SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The closer you are to the number one spot will determine the percentage of these monthly searches you will receive. Most of your traffic will come from Google, even if you get #1 spots in all three major engines, Yahoo and MSN will return less traffic - at least this has been my experience.
Keep in mind, even keywords with low search numbers may still be profitable. For example, 'unique corporate gift ideas' only has around 400 searches but this may be very profitable for companies or websites that cater to corporate gifts. Also remember, some searches are seasonal, i.e. the number of searches made for 'valentine gifts' in July will greatly differ from those made in February.
2. How Much Competition Does Your Have?
You must know the level of competition for each phrase you target with your online marketing. Extremely competitive keywords are not worth your time because you will not place for these keywords on the SERPs and you will get no traffic. As a general rule, the most popular keywords with 100's of thousands of searches a month will have the stiffest competition.
You can still place for very competitive keywords but it may require months, usually years of content/link building. Unless you use a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising system such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Marketing; you won't get any traffic from extremely competitive keywords. It's best to target keywords with little or no competition.
One of the best sites to use to find out your keyword's competition is Google. If you type your phrase 'corporate gift ideas' into Google search you will see there are 7,660,000 pages/listings returned. To get the number of pages that have your exact phrase, you need to search your phrase within quotation marks "corporate gift ideas" and you will see it has around 275,000 pages featuring your phrase.
If you check out the sites on the first three pages of listings you can determine the level of your competition. I use the professional research software Elite to determine my competition. But here's a quick way to check the PR (Page Rank) of the listings for your phrase. Let's run thru an example.
First do a search in Google for 'corporate gift ideas' and then highlight and copy the return url.
Next go to this site http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank and paste in your Google return url:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=corporate+gift +ideas&btnG=Search
This will give you a quick visual pagerank of all your chosen keyword's Top 10 competitors!
3. How To Know If Your Is Really Profitable?
One quick and simple way to tell if your is profitable, i.e. people are making money from promoting and optimizing your chosen phrase.
Take your phrase and type it into Google, Yahoo and MSN. Just
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