Starting a Home Based Business: Keywords are Jet Fuel

When starting a home based business there will be a lot of things to consider and decisions to be made. However, from the standpoint of marketing your site, there is no bigger decision than what keyword or keyword phrase you will use. Now for anyone new to internet marketing and is starting a home based business, let me explain, in layman's terms, what a keyword is.

We have all have used the search engines to find information we are looking for. When you enter a word or phrase into a search engine, that is a keyword. As you may or may not know, there are statistics on the most commonly used keywords and keyword phrases. A lot of the revenue that search engines earn comes from advertising, and when using a pay-per-click service you must select the right keywords.

There are three main considerations regarding the proper keyword selection.

1. You want a keyword that is relevant to what you are marketing and selling.

2. You need to select a keyword that has a significant number of searches a day to make it worthwhile. If few people are searching on the keyword, nobody will see your site.

3. You do not want a keyword with so much competition on a specific keyword or your site won't be seen. This is especially true when just starting a home based business on the internet.

You see, what happens is sites are optimized for search engines. When people are starting a home based business, they will use keywords in the text of the site and other places embedded in the code of the site, which helps the search engines give you a higher page rank. Search engines use keywords and how well your site is optimized for that keyword as one of the criteria to rank your site. The better your site is optimized the better it will rank.

As of this article writing there are 367,000 sites that relate to the keyword term 'pet turtles'. Those 367,000 sites all have something about pet turtles in them. However, in order to rank on the first page of that search, one of the things that has to happen is you need to optimize your site, so the search engines see the keyword 'pet turtles'.

However, if you were starting a home based business and you were selling pet turtles, the keyword of 'pet turtles' is not good, as it is too broad. Those 367,000 sites have to do with anything and everything about pet turtles....selling, caring for, trading, naming, etc. If you were selling pet turtles, you would want a more specific keyword, like 'pet turtles for sale'.

After you find a more specific keyword the next thing you need to check, is your competition for that keyword, and how often people search for that phrase. There are a lot of tools available that can help you choose. There is something called KEI Analysis. This is the Keyword Effectiveness Index. The higher this number, the more effective this keyword is for your website. The KEI increases when the number of searches per day increases, but it also decreases when the number of competing websites increases.

A simple tool that is free that provides a high level overview of your keyword effectiveness is Google's Keyword Tool. You can plug in your keyword and get a quick sense of your competition, the number of searches, as well as additional keywords to consider that are in the same category.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to keywords and starting a home based business. When you start to use pay-per-click advertising your selection of the right keyword will drive profit to your site. If you choose poorly, it will cost you money.

You need to make sure you do the proper research, spend the time, and make the correct selection of keywords as when you do, you will see your income soar.