subject: Picking the Best Keywords For Driving Traffic to Your Site [print this page] Picking the Best Keywords For Driving Traffic to Your Site
Ok you've got the best article/video/podcast etc ever seen in your niche so money's just going to come pouring in, right? Wrong! What good is having great content if that great content isn't found? Let me drive this point home a little. Google your niche. Go to between page ten or twenty of that search and open some pages. Often you'll find sites this far off in the search that actually have good layout and decent substance. Some may even be better than the sites coming up top of the search.
The reason for this is simple; the site hasn't been marketed properly! Without getting too technical, search engine optimization is creating content which is likely to show up high in a Google search. Remember 80% of a site's traffic is usually from a search engine! Search engine optimization in the form of choosing the best keywords to target is a vital part of weather you're going to get traffic and succeed online.
Fortunately choosing the best keywords is quite easy! Just go to Google AdWords keyword tool, which is free to use. Type in a word or phrase or even multiple words or phrases to do with your niche. Then you click search to see other keyword suggestions Google has given you related to your search. So for example, if you put in house training a dog, you might get back; house training a puppy. These suggestions are actually other searches made by people in the last month which are similar to your search term. This is extremely powerful!
The next thing to do is choose which one to use. A good rule of thumb is pick keywords with a search volume between 8,000 and 30,000 global monthly searches. This means the keyword is searched for a lot but the competition for it isn't too high. In other articles I describe how to use these keywords.
