KeyWord Elite

How To Make Money Off The Internet with Keywords

Creating a website is only half the battle. You have to get people there, and a big part of that is targeting the right keywords in order to get useful traffic to your site. You must first check the number of searches and amount of competition for your chosen keywords.

Instead of picking highly competitive keywords, take the middle road and milk the 'long tail keywords'! Most webmasters create a master keyword list for their site then branch off into sub-categories from this master list. For example, if you have a site on laptops your sub-keyword categories could be laptop accessories, laptop batteries and so on. Similar, most webmasters only develop their sites in a simple hierarchy with the homepage as the center with their major keywords as separate pages and then sub-categories branching out from these. Your webpages should not be more than three clicks away from your homepage as this will really displease the search engine gods!

Generate your own keyword list

The next step is to generate a basic keyword list. This will be your starting point for further research. A simple way to do this is to brainstorm key terms for each one of your goals by thinking about what you would search for if you were looking for what you provide. It also helps to check your keywords by Googling them just to make sure you are on the right track.

Using a video game example, let’s say that I've decided that the goal of my site is to sell sports video games for the four major US sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey). Here's the list that I come up with:

sports video game
sports gaming
baseball video game
football video game
basketball video game
hockey video game
madden video game

That's enough to get started. The next step is to use the free tools available to expand the list and determine what terms are searched most frequently.

Use keyword tools to expand your list

Using the Keyword Suggestion Tool, you should add any keywords to your list that are applicable to your site that you did not think of. You should also add the monthly search volume for each term to your list.

Select keywords

Now that you have a substantial list of keywords and their associated search volumes, determining your final list is just a matter of eliminating keywords that don't apply to your site. Below is my final list for the sports video game site and the corresponding estimated monthly search volume:

madden 2007 - 280,879
nba 2k7- 35,032
nba live 2007 - 31,616
madden nfl 2007 - 26,610
2007 madden release date - 21,028
ncaa 2007 - 14,763
nhl 2007 - 10,602
mlb 2k6 - 8,864
nhl 2007 ea sports - 5,159
nhl 2k7 - 6,006

As you can see, my final list looks drastically different than my initial list. That's because I discovered that specific game titles are searched much, much more frequently than the type of game or genre. A term like 'football video game' gets searched only 1,873 times, compared to 'madden 2007' which gets searched 280,879 times! Had I not done proper research, I may have optimized my site for the generic categories that are searched far less frequently. Instead, I will optimize the pages of my site for specific game titles.

How to use your keywords on your site

Now that you've selected your keywords, you can optimize your site accordingly. In addition to obvious changes to title tags, META tags, and image alt text, you should find a way to naturally use your keywords in page headings, links, and page copy. The key is to use your terms naturally. Search engines consider the surrounding text to make sure that you are using keywords in proper context and that you aren't spamming keywords. So a text that reads “Madden 2007 is the only Xbox NFL video game that is licensed by the NFL and NFLPA” will help you more (and read better) than a text reading “Madden 2007 is for the Xbox and Madden 2007 has NFL Players. Madden 2007 is also on the Playstation 2 and Madden 2007 is officially licensed by the NFL.”

Google PageRank

The Google toolbar tells you what number PageRank a site is on a 0 to 10 scale. A higher PR ranking means better rankings for your site and your keyword phrases. It simply means more traffic and more sales. If you're optimizing for Google, you should do everything you can to get the highest PR you can possibly get. More importantly, you should be doing everything you can to increase the PR of the pages where you have your long-tail keyword phrases as organic traffic from these pages will usually turn out to be your site's main revenue source.  One of the quickest ways to raise your Google PR is to get one-way links from high PR6, PR7 and PR8 sites (Think Article Marketing). Google considers these links as votes for your site and ranks your site or page accordingly. Consistently get enough of these incoming one-way links over the long haul and your PR will go up if you have high quality unique content pages that are well optimized with good navigation and formatting.

Another great way to see PR in action is to use the Visual PageRank tool.

It will show you the PageRank of all internal and external links on a webpage at once. Extremely helpful when you're checking out any site or page for at a glance you can see the current Google PageRank of all these links.

Google is all about pooling pages from relevant and trusted websites. Having said this, if you market using free but popular websites, your business name can syndicate throughout Google more effectively.