Good Keywords Can Transform Your Website Into A Profitable Online Business

The internet runs on keywords. There are millions of websites across the globe and all of them are trying to get their fair share of visitors. If you don't know what a keyword is, you are not alone. Many business owners build their websites with a limited knowledge of internet marketing and make mistakes that they are not even aware of. But, first things first.

KEYWORDS

A keyword, or keyword phrase, is a word, or words, that someone might type into a search engine to find relevant websites. For example, if you want to go see a movie in Beverly Hills, you might type in "Beverly Hills Movie Theater." That is a keyword phrase and if you run a movie theater in Beverly Hills, you will want to be at the top of the list when someone types that into a search engine.

GOOD KEYWORDS

If you are a website owner, you will want to find good keywords that are relevant to your product or service. Good keywords connect buyers and sellers. The key to finding a good keyword is to identify keyword phrases that get significant traffic from your target market and are not too competitive. Some keywords are so profitable that large companies spend thousands of dollars to get to the top of search results. If your website is a one-man operation, it would be hard to compete against those resources.

THE GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL

Luckily, you don't have to guess which keywords get good traffic. Google, the largest of the search engines, provides a tool that anyone can use, for free, to find the best keywords. If you're not sure whether to use "car parts," or "auto parts" for your website, go to the Google Keyword Tool and it will give you the answer.

KEYWORD COMPETITION

There is no surefire way to find out how difficult it would be to rank well for any given keyword. People use a variety of methods to gauge the competition. One of the more popular methods that people use for determining the competitiveness of a keyword phrase is to type the phrase into Google with quotes around the phrase.

When you run a search in Google with quotes, it gives you the results for websites that contain that exact phrase. Some people will decide that if there are less than 100,000 websites containing that phrase, it is a good keyword. Some people might say less than 50,000, or 10,000, it depends on the business model and the amount of work someone is willing to put in to get their website on the first page of search results.

Another method that internet marketers use to find keywords that aren't too competitive is to look at the PageRank of the top webpages for the relevant keyword phrase. PageRank is a number assigned by Google, between 0 - 10, that indicates the strength of that webpage. You can determine the PageRank of the search results with free internet marketing tools, such as the Google toolbar, or SEO for Firefox at SEO Book.

When using the PageRank to determine competition, you are looking for low numbers. The lower the number, the lower the strength of the website, according to Google. If you type in your keyword phrase and the top 5 search results contain webpages with PageRank 5, 6, 6, 7 and 4, it will take a lot of work to beat those webpages in the search results.

Most people consider webpages with PageRank of 3 or less to be low competition, depending on how hard you're willing to work to get on the first page of search results. However, PageRank is only one factor that Google takes into consideration when returning search results. A PageRank 2 website can show up ahead of a PageRank 5 website if it's better optimized for the specific keyword query.