Submitted By: Danny Warner on 2006-07-20

 

Keywords are the words that people type into a search engine to find things online. They can be single words like “marketing” or a phrase like “internet marketing tips.” Internet search engines list websites based on keywords and using important keywords on your blog will help drive traffic to your blog. More traffic means more readers and more reader’s means more money for you.

Determining your keywords is actually the process of deciding “If I were a person looking for the affiliate products I am promoting, what keywords would I use in a search engine?” The process requires a bit of intuition and out of the box thinking. When you target keywords to your topic, search engines will send traffic to your blog for free.

Start with creating a list of keywords that are relevant to your blog topic. The best way to do this is to brainstorm on a piece of paper. Write down every term that comes into your mind related to the topic. If you hit a wall, you can find websites selling similar products, and then use the ABAKUS reverse keyword generator to see what terms they are using.

Once you have an extensive list to work with, you’ll need to analyze your keywords. Set up a spreadsheet with five columns: Keyword, # of Searches (Demand), # of Sites (Supply), Demand/Supply Ratio and Max bid. Take your keyword list to a keyword research tool such as Yahoo Search Marketing. This tool will tell you how many times your keywords have been used in the Yahoo search engine. Although Yahoo receives less searches per month than Google, this tool will give you a good idea on whether or not a keyword is popular.

Yahoo Search Marketing will also suggest keywords that are related to the word that you typed in. Add any of these words to your master list if they are relevant to your blog topic. At this point, your list of keywords will be very long. Make a note next to each keyword of how many searches it received in the last month. From this point on, you’ll be focusing your efforts on only the keywords that have 5000 or more search results. These keywords and the number of searches will go in the “keyword” and “demand” columns of your spreadsheet.

To find the supply for each of the keywords, you’ll need to visit Google.com. Do a search for each of the keywords on your spreadsheet. The search results will show in the upper right hand corner how many total websites are using that keyword term. This will show the “demand” for the keyword, so make a note in the appropriate column.

The “demand/supply ratio” will allow you to figure out which keywords have high demand and low supply. To calculate the ratio, divide the supply column by the demand column. Look for the keywords with the highest ratio and highlight them on your list.

The final step is to find the max bid for the keywords terms in pay per click systems. You can use Yahoo Search Marketing again to find what people are bidding per click for advertising on your targeted keywords.

Once you’ve completed your spreadsheet and found the relevant keywords, remove any products that have keywords with too low of a supply/demand ratio. After this process, you’ll have a targeted keyword list to start creating a profitable blog.

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