Savvy Affiliate

Day 25 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Targeting the right keywords is essential to building up your website.  Since, on average, 80% of the traffic for a mature site come through search engines, you need keywords that are both searched for, and make money

Finding High Search Volume Keywords

There are several tools available to find which keywords are being searched for.  Use them as one stage in figuring out what keywords are the best for your to target

SEO Book - Keyword Suggestion Tool - Type in your keyword or phrase and it will tell you how many people searched for that over the past month.  It will also give you suggestions on what other keyword variations are, and how many people searched for them

Overture Keyword Tool - Run by Yahoo, the industry leader in search…..    Sorry, had a 1999 flashback.  In all seriousness, the overture keyword tool is quite handy.  It will give you your search phrase, variations, and how many people looked for that phrase in a recent month.   Though you should take their numbers with a grain of salt, they are good to keep in mind.

Adwords - The other two methods of searching for keywords are free, this one requires a sign up and a minimum investment ($5-$10)  But it is by far the most powerful of the tools.  Using it you can get search trends, keyword popularity, and how much people are bidding to take the top spots for keywords.  It is a great tool to determine high paying keywords.

Finding Valuable Keywords

 If you don’t want to invest money in Adsense in order to determine the most valuable keywords, a Google search can be the next best thing.  Think that a keyword will pay well?  Do a search for it and simply count how many ads appear on the right hand side of your screen.  These are the people who are bidding on the keywords, and who are directly responsible for how well a keyword pays.  If you see > 10 ads, the keyword is worth some money.  If you see pages and pages of ads, i.e. search for IXwebhost, you know that that keyword is worth a ton of money, and there is a lot of competition.  If there aren’t any ads on Google, there won’t be any on your site.  So if you don’t see ads, chances are people aren’t searching for it, and they sure aren’t paying for it.  Choose another one.

What tricks do you use to target your keywords?  Do you keep your keywords targeted secret to limit competition?  Or broadcast them to try and get more backlinks?