What Does the Customer Want?
Keyword Research*

If you choose the wrong keywords, your site may never see the light of day - or if it does, the person who arrives there will hit the back button so fast your head will swim.

Many a dollar has been made by folks selling keyword research tools that promise to provide you with keywords nobody else has (except all the other people who purchase that software).   Please, put your wallets back in your pocket, pocketbook or purse.

You don't need expensive keyword research tools to find the right keywords.   I'll sell you one if you really, really want one , but you don't need one.   The really hard part about keyword research is you have to think.

Let's say you want to sell a Dog Training eBook from Clickbank.  If you use the words 'Dog Training' as your keyword, you'll probably never ever sell a single book.   Go over to Google and check out that term (make sure you look for the term in quotes).  There are over 12 million sites out there about Dog Training.

Okay, so you figure a lot of those sites are not optimized correctly so you try to narrow it down by putting in Google allintitle:"Dog Training".   This will tell how many of the sites have the words 'dog training' in the title of the page.   There are only 565,000.

Let's see how many searches there are for that term.   So you go over to the free Wordtracker Tool or the free Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool  and put in dog training.   (Tip: You can usually multiply the numbers you get from Wordtracker by about 10 for a more accurate number.)

There are over 3300 searches each month for dog training.   (There's a huge spike in the searches in January . . . I wonder if that's because of all the puppies given at Christmas or all the bad dogs over the holidays?) Hmmmmm.

That would be 3300 searches for 565,000 websites.   I'd say we have a lot of competition.  Let's look down the list and see exactly what they're searching for.   The phrase "crate training a dog" gets 185 searches a month with only 165 pages out there with crate training a dog in the title.  A very relevant, well SEO'd (Search Engine Optimized) webpage would be able to beat the competition fairly quickly.

So, 'crate training a dog' would be a good keyword phrase.  You could start by either writing articles or lenses and test the waters.  If you find you get some business from this phrase you might want to set up a blog or website.

There are probably other phrases on that list we received when we put the words 'dog training' in which would be great keywords, that's just the first one I picked out.   But you see the way it's done.  (You would want to go down that list and check most if not all those phrases for pages with that phrase in the title.)

My point is, if you find a phrase that gets 200 searches a month and there are 2000 pages with that phrase in the title, it's probably either a phrase already over saturated in the market, or the phrase is not specific enough.   Dog training is not a very specific phrase - not everyone typing in that phrase is looking to buy an e-book on dog training.

Once you've done your keyword research, you're ready to start writing articles or lenses.   You'll want to use your keyword in the title of your article and sprinkle it through your writing as well.   For more information on writing articles or creating lenses follow the links.

* Yes, this is another long article . . . sorry about that, but research is boring . . .   Keyword Research is a critical step to the success of your business.