How To Make Online Money

Once you pick a niche, you need to target certain keywords. Even if your niche isn’t fully developed in your mind, you can use keyword research to help you narrow (or broaden) your focus.

Think of this as a brain-storming exercise. If I were to pick a niche of, say, lawn mower blades, I need to think about all the possible related words and phrases to that niche.

Why? Because keywords (or keyword phrases) are how people will find your website. When someone asks Google a question like, “Where can I buy a blade for a Toro zero-turn radius?”, they never mentioned the word “lawn mower”. But ‘Toro’ and ‘zero-turn radius’ are related keywords.

The more keywords you can come up with the more topics you have to create web pages for (blog posts), increasing your virtual real estate.

The problem is, humans can only think of so many related words…computers can come up with thousands of words, much faster than we could come up with 100!

In another post, I’ll list several tools that can help you brainstorm thousands of keyword phrases.

But there’s more to keyword research than just developing a long list of related terms and phrases. Good tools will provide information like how often people are actually searching those terms, and even how much competition there is out there for a given keyword phrase. Ideally you will discover a phrase that is frequently searched, but has not many pages out there about that phrase. This will make it easier for you to be found in the search engine results. You want a low “Results/Search” ratio. Take two different phrases, for example (completely fictitious):

• mower blade sharpening – searched 1000 x per day – 20 websites resulting for that phrase (R/S Ratio of .02)
• mower accessories – searched 2 million x per day – 6 million websites resulting (R/S Ratio of 3)

It’s tempting to go after ‘mower accessories’ because of the number of searches per day. But the competition is such that you might never get found. On the other hand, if you go after the keyword ‘mower blade sharpening’, you only have 20 other sites to beat…and you can do that easily!

So you want Quantity (lots of keywords to choose from) and Quality (good phrases with low R/S ratios).

You will use these keywords to do things like:

• choose a domain name (your dot.com name – DON’T buy a domain name until after your research!)
• select topics to write content about
• use correct keywords for ‘anchor tags’ for inbound links that you post
• pick keywords to bid on for advertising (if you choose to spend money on inbound clicks)

The ultimate goal is to have some page from your website rank highly in the search engines (chiefly Google) when someone enters in the keyword phrase.

There are two tools that I commonly use, and have written other posts about them:

• SEO Keyword Tool - This one is free, but limited in its results.
• Keyword Elite – This one is the best keyword research tool available.  Period.