Keyword Research - Things you need to do before you write your contents

I always hold a view that if you are writing for a certain topic it will be naturally optimized. In fact I am still hold this view. However, you need to find a topic to write for your niche though. In this case keyword research will be very important.

By conducting keyword research, you are trying to find:

• Keywords that are of lower competitions


• Keywords that are of high search volume

It will be very difficult to get high ranking for extremely competitive keyword and the above two points become very crucial. To be more specific, long tail keywords are usually easier to optimize for.

Normally, long tail keywords contains three or more words. Taking "office supplies" for example, a long tail of it will be "local office supplies in New York City". From this you should be able to figure out that the chance of getting a high ranking for the long tail key words should be a lot higher. Of course you may have fewer clicks to your site even if you get thr first place in Google. However, since it is highly target, the conversions can probably be very high with the long tail keyword.

Affiliate Programs - A Site You Must Visit

I came across an interesting website on affiliate marketing last week. In fact it is a blog and the webmaster is called Paul. From the information of the blog, he can really make quite a large amount of money from affiliate marketing. He is really a super affiliate.

From his blog, he shares his experiences on affiliate marketing. It covers most of the topics you will need to know about affiliate programs. From finding a niche, choosing keyword to designing the landing page. Of course you should not expect he will tell you all the technique and secrets of his success in affiliate marketing. But it is still good to learn something from him.

His website is http://uberaffiliate.com/ and you should visit this site when you have time.

Find the best keyword for your niche

It is always believed that in order to make money online with your website, your website needs to be listed and ranked well in Google. This will fall back to the idea of SEO. However, there are some keywords which are more competitive and more difficult to rank well. On the contrary, there are some keywords which are less competitive and you may get a good rank relatively easier.

So, how do you determine the best keyword for your website or your niche. Here "the best" means keywords that are popular for searchers but with little competitions. There are basically some ways to research on the best keywords.

1 Using Software

One of the software that can help is Word Tracker. By using this software, you can get an index with the keywords you choose and you can know if the keywords are good as your target from the index. Another software, Wordze, can also do this job.

2 Calculating Yourself

You can make use of the Overture Keyword Tool to get an estimation of the number of searches in a month for your keyword, you can then simply divide this number by the total number of results shown in Google when you search for the keywords. i.e.

Estimated number from Overture / Total number of results in Google = INDEX

The larger the INDEX, the better the keywords are. Some people may further manipulate the formula in order to get a result which suits his/her needs. For example, some may take the square of the numerator to be divided by the total number of results in Google. As a matter of fact, the Overture Keyword Tool has not been updated for a long time. If you would want to get some more updated estimation of total volume of searches, you may also try Keyword Discovery Tool, which is free.

Besides the above, there are still some other issues you need to consider. You need to take a look at the search results in Google to see if the web pages getting the highest rank are highly optimized. If this is the case, it will be difficult for you to get a good rank, although there is less competition. This is also know as a problem about such index. It is assumed that the difficulties in getting from 1000th to 500th will be the same as getting from 500th to 1th. But this is not true in most cases.

As a result, you should not just rely on the index or the formula, you have also to take other issues into account in order to get the best keywords.