Never, Ever, EVER begin optimizing your website unless you have proven that your keywords will do two things: 1) Generate website traffic for your business; 2) Attract only those prospects interested in what you’re selling.

It seems simple. It seems small. It doesn’t even take that long to do. Creating a list of keywords to use to optimize your website or blog is not a complicated task. That is, until you find out you have the wrong keywords. There are many steps and methods for choosing a list of targeted, popular, low competition and "relative" keywords for your business, but you should never settle on a list of keyword phrases until you’ve tested them for success!

So, how do you find out if your keywords will attract the right prospects? And more importantly, how do you do this quickly?!!

The answer is pay-per-click, or PPC. By leveraging paid advertising through Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing you can quickly find out beyond a shadow of a doubt just how profitable your keywords will be for your business.

To briefly give you an idea how to set up a keyword test (both Google and Yahoo have video tutorials on how to use their services) here are a list of steps to follow:

1. Set up a "Landing Page" with a lead-capture form that contains some kind of "offer" that you will give your visitor in exchange for his or her email address

2. Break your keywords into related groups (you may want to use a free tool called Traffic Travis to do this)

3. Create a campaign in your preferred PPC provider (Google often has promotions for $100 to use towards advertising) for your keyword test

4. Put your groups of keywords each in a separate "ad group" and write an ad for each (To get ideas for ads run a search for your keywords in the search engine and look at the competing advertisers ads) NOTE: Make sure the ad is consistent with your offer on the landing page

5. Be sure to set a daily limit on your spending

6. Let this test run for a week and then go back and evaluate your results.

Don’t be overwhelmed by all of the features and options available to you in the PPC interface. You are just testing which keywords have the highest "attraction" and conversion rates.

In a week, go back into your account and look at the number of times each keyword prompted your ad to be displayed. Then look at the "click-through rate". The number of displays will give you an idea of how popular the keyword phrase is, and the click-through rate will tell you how well searchers who input that particular keyword are attracted to your offer. This gives you an idea of just how often a placement in the search results will lead to targeted website traffic.

In the event that your results are inconclusive, which can occur if you do not have enough traffic (often caused by a low position in the results) you can run the test again for another week. But before you do, increase your bid by 25-50% for all keywords that are not in the top 4 positions.

Keep in mind that the higher required bid is due to increased competition and will likely result in more natural search engine optimization competition as well.

Utilizing this simple (and free, if you get Google Adwords’ $100 credit) method of keyword conversion testing you can save thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours you’d otherwise be wasting on keywords that just don’t convert for your particular business. Whether this is your first time at keyword selection or the hundredth, there is simply no reason not to go through this final keyword evaluation step.