Your keyword choices are critical to your success in nearly any online business model. Whether you're pursuing PPC, blogging, VRE and AdSense, or any number of Internet marketing opportunities, the keywords you choose can make or break your success.

Keywords are important for several reasons. First of all, there's traffic. If you choose the wrong keywords to target, you're probably not going to get nearly as much traffic as you'd like. Whether you're using PPC or search engines to get your traffic, your keywords are going to affect your ranking and link performance.

Another reason why keywords are so vital is the fact that you need targeted traffic. Ten thousand visitors coming to your domain via the keyword “books” is probably going to be worthless compared to 500 visitors who come via the keyword phrase, “Harry Potter books,” if that's what you're selling.

How People Search the Internet Using Keywords

Someone who is searching for “books” is probably just browsing. They may not even be interested in buying anything - they could be interested in selling books, book bans, book publishers, and more.

But someone who is searching for “Harry Potter books” is probably ready to buy something right then and there. So it's not enough to just get a lot of traffic – you need a lot of traffic that's willing to take the action you want them to take.

Whether you're looking to sell eBooks, promote affiliate products, get leads for a CPA offer, or just get sign-ups to your list, you want targeted visitors who are likely to be buyers now or in the future.

Which Keywords to Choose

Once you've chosen a niche you'd like to pursue, you need to research the keywords you'll use. If you're writing articles, you'll need to choose keywords to use in the titles and text. If you're building niche websites, you'll need to use keywords in the domain name. If you're buying PPC traffic, the keywords you choose will likely be one of the biggest factors determining whether or not your campaign is profitable.

Keyword Tools

WordTracker is a very good tool for researching keywords. If you can't afford to get a paid membership there (even for a day), they have a very good free keyword tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

Google has their own keyword tool, but they don't show you numbers. They only give you a general idea of the searches a keyword gets, as indicated by a colored bar: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

How to Use Keyword Tools

First you'll want to enter a base keyword for your niche. Let's say you're targeting the golf niche. You might enter “golf” into the keyword tool of your choice. Then the keyword tool will show you a number of related keywords.

You might come up with “golf clubs,” “golf tips,” “golf swing,” “golf bags,” “golf carts,” and “golf courses.” This is a short list of more broad terms. But you'll want to generate a warehouse of keywords that you can use over the coming months and years, so grab them all!

SEO is important to getting indexed in the search engines and to bring organic search engine traffic but basic SEO should only take a small amount of a bloggers time.
People spend hours trying to get back links when only a few reciprocal links to your blog are necessary to be found by Google.

You have seen this written more than once “Write for People Not for the Search Engines”. Writing for people means writing high quality content. Quality content is automatically search engine friendly as it will be filled with keywords that people use to search the internet.

You can have a large amount of web traffic but without solid content visitors will not return.

Here are links to some past articles to help with the above:

Write Articles People Want to Read

Google Rules the Net

Once you have chosen the subject of your blog article, the first thing to do is check what keyword phrases people use in search engines to find information related to that subject.

Select from the results of your search a few keyword phrases to use throughout the article. Some people say that blog articles should be optimized for only one keyword and that’s what I do. But by using phrases instead of a unique word you are letting the search engines know that your blog post is really relevant to your subject giving you higher rankings.

Writing for the Internet

I originally intended to title this article “Writing for the Internet” but my research showed me that no one searched for those words.

A search for “Writing for Blogs” gave me these results:

   Count Search Term
• 334 blog writing
• 66   blog style writing
• 53   blog make money writing
• 34   creative writing blog
• 26   blog service writing

Luckily, the list of terms is quite small so it would be easy to include them all in my post. Guess what? I just did include them above. Unfortunately they are all next to each other and not spread out throughout the text.

Blog SEO Optimization

The keyword density thought to be optimal for SEO optimization is 2 – 10%. Which means don’t over do it. If you do go overboard the search engines will consider what you wrote as article spam. Article spam will place you in search engine limbo and getting out is not an easy thing to accomplish.

Here is a basic checklist for SEO optimization. Meaning places where the keywords used in writing our blog article should appear.

Title
Sub-header
Meta Tags ==> Keywords and Description

The above of course will not guarantee a top ten position in Google but it will help.

To make your page easier to read and scan use bold, highlighting, underlining and colored fonts in the text. Insert a picture to liven up the post.

Sentences should be short and to the point. Most importantly the content should give the reader useful information. You are writing for people not only the search engines. Good content will have readers linking back giving you backlinks and more readers.

I hope you found the above to be helpful in your blog writing. I would really appreciate any comments negative or positive.

The opening paragraph is your introduction. You will be telling the reader the subject of the article and give them a reason to keep on reading. A brief overview will give readers what they can expect to get out of the rest of the article.

Tell them about the problem you will help them with.

Let them know what problem you are going to help them with. Assure them that you have a solution that will save them time, money or trouble. When you are writing your opening paragraph keep in mind that you have to give them a good reason to keep on reading or they may lose interest and look elsewhere.

It is also important to establish credibility with the reader. After all why should they listen to you, have you had this problem and if so how did it affect you and your business? When you solved the problem, what benefits did it bring you and how did it make things better?

If you can establish credibility with your reader they will be willing to listen to you and follow your advice. If you lack credibility in their eyes, they may be unwilling to follow your advice and will most likely be uninterested in what you have to
offer.

The simpler and clearer the answers the better and preferably giving them step by step examples on how to do it in the article.  Some examples could be; Four Ways to Sleep Like a Baby Every Night or How to Cure a Hangover in Three Easy Steps.

How to find the problems that need solving? Hopefully you are writing an article about a subject or hobby that passions you.  Look at your past experiences and remember the problems you encountered and how you solved them. And voila! You have your article.

Still can't find a problem that needs a solution. The easiest place to find a problem that needs solving is to go where people are asking questions: http://answers.yahoo.com not only will you find problems in dozens of categories but you may also find some good solutions. Just read up and start writing that article.

The Right Title

Once you have written your article having an attention pulling title is what will get people interested in reading your article.

The title should be as descriptive and catchy as you can make it. The readers first glance at the title should make him want to read the content.

You will need to practice writing exciting titles. Create a swipe file of titles that you find exciting. Refer to it every time you write an article and you will find it gets easier every time.

Blog Writing the Right Way

Quality articles need to be keyword optimized. Most visitors to your blog or website arrived there by typing in one or more keywords related to the topic of your website in a search engine. Research your keywords carefully. Well optimized articles have a much better chance of getting positioned in the top 30 results in the search engines. Giving you free organic search engine traffic.

Blog posts should have a word count of at least 200 words. Website articles should have a minimum 500 words per page.

Your readers will enjoy the well written content and return often to read new content. Happy readers will recommend your website to others.

Blogs and websites will link back to your site. These incoming links will make you known as a trusted authority. Incoming links from relevant websites will help increase your Google PageRank.

Really good content will be mentioned on social networking and bookmarking sites which may bring more traffic than your server can handle.

Link to other related articles on your site to get more page views. Rinse and repeat. Meaning, keep adding content to your site regularly, this way people will keep coming back and new visitors will stay longer.

The extra time spent on writing quality content is well worth it.