Online Business for Dummies: Keywords

Many new online business owners just use keywords and phrases that relate to what they are selling, and are unaware of exactly WHAT keywords are and WHY they are so important in getting traffic to your website.

Here are the 8 most important things that you need to know about keywords:

A keyword is a word or phrase that a person types into a search engine.
Where a phrase is used, you need to have it EXACT in how it needs to be written, without any other words or punctuation in between (eg. If your keyword is “kitten sweaters” then “kittens sweater” would be wrong, and so would “kitten, sweaters”).
This is one of the most frequent mistakes we see with people that have the right keywords, but are using them incorrectly and therefore missing out on traffic and income.
When selecting a keyword it must have traffic, meaning that people actually need to be searching for that phrase frequently in order to make it worth targeting.
Common keywords such as “real estate” have an incredibly large number of competitors. For these types of keywords you need to use them merely as a starting point to identify others, as you would need to fight against millions of competing websites and be highly unlikely to ever end up with a good ranking in the search engines.
With keyword research it is easy to fall into the trap of ‘snapping up’ high traffic keywords with few competitors immediately upon seeing them. There is often a reason as to why phrases are not being targeted.
High traffic, low number of competitors does not always mean that you stand a chance of getting a high ranking in the search engines. Your goal is to get onto the first page of Google, and so even if you only have several hundred competitors, if the top 10 in Google for that keyword are high ranking, well established and optimized websites you would be wasting your time with that keyword.
The other trap to watch for with high traffic, low number of competitor keywords is the INTENT of the person searching for the phrase. If you are trying to sell something and the majority of people using that keyword are only looking for information you will make far fewer sales than the traffic numbers would initially point to.
Beware of ‘dual meaning’ keywords. There are often businesses, music groups and products that all have simular or identical names. If you are trying to promote your UK country band “Dallas Cowboys” – make sure that you choose keywords that are not going to land you with people looking for “Dallas Cowboys” the US NFL team.
One dead giveaway that you have a ‘dual meaning’ keyword is having a huge number of visitors to your website, however a very high bounce rate*.