Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Copyright (c) 2008 Phillip Booker

KEYWORDS and KEY PHRASES as we know these are the lifeblood of the internet. Without proper control of these we would not have an internet business.

We cannot name a web page 'page01.html' and expect it to rank well in a search engine. We need to use our keywords, in the page title and appropriately through the page. Ideally it is best to use one keyword per page otherwise the search engines struggle to determine which keyword is the more dominant upon that page.

We no doubt have all discovered a technique on how to find more keywords to develop our own list. As you may or may not now your list of keywords and keyword phrases should vary in their potential from very popular to just a few clicks per day. Allow me to explain further.

If your intended list was 200 keywords, then not all should be very popular. This is because your website initially cannot compete with the top ranked websites. Apart from good search engine optimization, you'll need longevity and backlinks to help bolster your ranking position. Meanwhile the 'lower ranked keywords phrases', generally referred to as 'long tailed keywords' stand a better chance of getting your web pages ranked on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

This ability to rank on the first page of the search engines is down to your research on long tail keywords; it is these that will generate the traffic for your site over the first few months of its existence. Once your site is more established you should be able to get your more popular keywords ranked too.

As I trot around the internet on various forums I notice specifically that many can't establish a niche to start a website or a home based business, and wonder where to get the inspiration from. Well I find that the inspiration is in the keyword list.

If you take a keyword that has over a million searches a month, the market is obviously buoyant. Perhaps for a newcomer such buoyancy means that it is difficult to get in and compete successfully with the so called BIG boys. But this is where many people fall before they've started.

A niche can be found within a niche, we'd call that a sub niche. If for example we looked at a popular niche such as SPORTS CLOTHES but found too many other competitors, we could easily be disinterested from approaching this niche. But if we explored the potential long tail keywords we may find a sub niche such as white sports socks, with 418,000 web pages listed all are actually deep inner pages of a larger site. This could mean that if you started a website called - white-sports-socks.com you could have a potential market already for the waiting. Plus of course it wouldn't take much to get your website at the top of the rankings.

In every working day you should allocate 5% to 10% of your time for research and development. It is this time where you can explore the potential of bigger niches. Not necessarily to understand bigger websites, but to understand where there is a lot of internet traffic. Such traffic can be dissected and split into further sub-niches. It is here where you can expand your internet campaigns, rather than concentrate on trying to attack the major keyword areas.

In conclusion... the main areas to develop a business or diversify and existing business is in the long tail keywords and phrases. Find a major keyword and explore the potential beneath the surface.