A lot has been written about keywords and their ability to bring traffic to your site but the average website builder has only limited knowledge of the world of keyword optimization for search engines. Google spiders websites and makes connections between certain words on your page content, as well as words in your site’s metadata and anchor links. Not only does Google examine these keyworded items, it compares them with your content to see if they are relevant to it. Google then assesses your sitemap, links to your site from external sites and a number of other checks are made. Google does not advertise its methodologies and methods so it is a bit of a black art keeping ahead of this game.

There are some important facts to remember about keywords:

 People need to be searching for the keywords you use; no searches = no traffic

 The keywords must be appropriately applied to gain rank in a search engine results page or they will perform no function.

 The keywords must generate value for you; a decent proportion of your traffic must be visitors who are ready to convert to a sale.

So you might be wondering, "without hiring an expensive SEO expert, can I get started and do my own keywords?" The answer is unless you are targeting a difficult keywords such as "loans" "MP3" or "lose weight" (which are all nigh-on impossible to rank above page 3) the answer is yes, you can do your own keyword research and improve your search result rankings considerably.

Some Keyword Basics

Before you even put on your website builder shoes, you need to brainstorm. Deciding on the products you are intending to sell is the first step. Once you have determined this, you will have to start doing some research into what keywords/keyword phrases are going to be potentially useful. Think of at least 10 search phrases for each product you are going to sell. If you sell a diet product, keywords like "healthy diet"," lose weight", "lose fat" etc….are so heavily competed for you will have little or no chance. The way to find out whether you are barking up the wrong tree is to use a great free keyword usage indicator from Google. The Adwords Keyword tool allows you to put in a keyword and find out exactly how many people searched for that phrase or word and how many sites with which you are competing. Therefore, for the "lose weight" keyword, you will only see a huge 2.74 million searches made. Interestingly you will notice if you do this search on Google, there is no "sales" website that comes up. It is an information only site. The way that they make a lot of money is providing losing weight information and just sidebar ads to click through to buy weight loss products. There is no advertising at all in the sales copy, but the ads on the page will probably enjoy a 5% click through rate, and from that, a 1-5% conversion rate.

That means that of the 2.7m/month visitors, the conversion rate works out at something like 2700000 X 5/100 X 3/100 = 4050 converted sales per month. Now that is only from one keyword and just a rough estimate, but consider that even 10% of that business would be over 400 sales per month! It makes no difference how well you build a website if you cannot get this aspect right. With this scenario, even if you use an online service to build a free website from a template, if your keywords are right, a great income can be achieved from gaining those high ranks.

So back to the keyword conundrum: "How do you get to sell a weight loss product without trying to compete with the fierce competition of the ‘weight loss’ keyword?" Well the Google Adwords shows that there is a search made by a large number of people on the term "fast effective weight loss" - over 7 million visitors - which is a quarter of the amount searching for "weight loss", but the difference is that the competition is a lot lower. Even if you cannot make the number one spot in the page rankings, you may well be able to get in the top five with a well-chosen site name and some good content copywriting. This approach is the way to find your place in markets that are otherwise hard to penetrate.

So before you create a website, put on your thinking cap and brainstorm some keywords, use Adwords to help you find those phrases that will get you a top five rank, then when you are done you can create a website that really will pull in some traffic and revenue. The key is all in the words.