An article by Georg Rauh

Effective Keywords - Basics of Keyword Research

Find the best keywords which you can use for your web site or your AdWords and AdSense Campaigns

There are various reasons why you would want to know about keyword research basics.

• Keyword research can be used in your search engine optimization (SEO) for your own web site. This means you would optimize your web site around the “right” keyword so that people, eg. potential customers will find your site, preferably at high position in Google when they perform a Google search using that word.

• Keyword research should be used to set up and optimize sites which contain your AdSense ads, since it could allow a certain amount of control what ads AdSense would display on your AdSense page. There are lower and higher paying ads, and with some effort you can try to control the kind of ads appearing on your site, preferrably the higher paying ones – once you did research which ads would be post profitable for you.

• On the contrary – you would want to use keyword research for your AdWords campaign also. If you are a Google Adwords publisher and want to keep your ad costs low you want to optimize your “landing pages” so the keywords in AdWords get a good quality score. This helps keeping your costs low and helps achieving a higher “click through rate” resulting in a more successful campaign.

• You can use keyword research for finding a profitable niche or idea for a market

You can very well go ahead and use the first best keyword coming to mind if you plan to set up your own web site, but the better way is using keyword research helping you to find what market would be most profitable. Profitable as in “low competitors but high search volume”

One very profitable market as an example:

What are people always looking for online? What is a very good source for keywords and getting highly searched for but rare keywords?

The answer is: Diseases and Illnesses!

The reason is that many people are often searching for information online and look for remedies or cures before they visit a doctor. They might also look for further material, like books on a certain disease….another field where you could jump in if you were an amazon.com affiliate, just as an example.

There are sites where you can download long lists of all kind of diseases for your keyword research: Look at http://www.mic.ki.se/Diseases/Alphalist.html

I compiled a list of a few thousand of diseases using that list and let it run it through a program like Keyword Elite. Keyword Elite as a result will give you a ratio “Searches <-> Results on the web”.

The higher the number of Google searches and (at the same time) the lower the competition, the more effective the keyword. Keyword Elite can also give you a “KEI” (Keyword Effectiveness Index) which is a representation of that very same ratio.

As you can hopefully see I won’t tell you what I came up with….but everyone can do research like this and with a tool like Keyword Elite and a few hours time find the most effective keywords.

It might take a few hours, the longer the list the longer Keyword Elite will work, but the found keywords are certainly worth it!

How To perform basic keyword research:

In Keyword Elite copy/paste all the compiled words into Project #2 and run it with the options “KEI”, “google broad match”.

As you might have figured out already, you do not need to stay with diseases or illnesses. Go out to big sites like ebay, amazon etc. and get some ideas and look where you can get and compile long lists of a certain kind which you want to run through Keyword Elite.

This could be brand names, products, lists of books or movies, actors, names of flowers, celebrities, video games… the possibilities are endless. Scour those sites to get some ideas for your new niche market.

Compile your list of keywords, a few hundreds or some thousands, and then find the most effective ones using Keyword Elite or similar tools.

You will have bigger success with keyword research, use it as a base for search engine optimization for your web site and for your AdSense and Adwords campaigns. Do not use any keyword - use the most effective keywords.

Georg Rauh is SEO specialist, writer and webmaster of http://www.1up-seo.com

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