Keywords are the heart of any online business. Whether you are advertising through PPC, networks such as Google and Yahoo or if you want your website ranked on the first page of organic search results, the success of your website will be determined on the keywords you use. By targeting the wrong keywords, you waste a lot of time and possibly money.

Currently, Google dominates the search engines taking nearly 65% of all searches daily. Yahoo has about 25% and MSN takes third with about 10% of the market. Therefore, in my opinion, Google is the only search engine worth optimizing for. And to get free traffic from Google, you need to be in the top results when someone does a search for a keyword or key phrase related to your webpage. About 80% of my organic searches to most of my websites comes from Google. So this is where the money is, but dont be fooled because the other search engines can still be profitable.

So our goal is to know what terms, related to our web page, people are typing into the search box at Google. By knowing this information, we can design our web pages around these terms and Google will think our page is important enough to show in the top of the search results. Here are a few examples of broad keywords or words you don’t want to use: Digital camera, Dogs, Computers, Software, Web hosting.

You need to ensure you target longer tail, niche specific keywords to ensure you are targeting a specific subset of prospects. There are many keyword services and keyword research software tools available that you can use to get a long list of keywords and keyword phrases. Use the Google Keyword Tool. I use it every day, and if you are not using it, you are missing the boat.

You’re probably thinking that doing all this work will take hours if not days to do… well your right. If keyword research is done properly, it will take a long time to search and analyze all the information but the effort is worth it, to the tune of many more sales notifications entering your inbox.