What is a keyword?  A keyword is a word or phrase that someone would type into a search engine to find what they are looking for.  Simple enough right?  Well there are good keywords and there are bad ones.   Generally, bad keywords are words or phrases that are just too broad or are informational based.  Meaning that someone is just looking for free information on something, like “laptop computers”.  A better keyword would be “cheap laptop computer accessories”.  Although this example is not perfect, the better keyword is more specific and this person is likely looking to buy laptop accessories.  This may be a keyword that you would want to rank on the first page of google for.

What is an effective keyword?  A good keyword is a word or phrase that someone that is ready to buy would search for in a search engine, like the example above.  Keyword research in a vital process to article marketing.

Step 1

To start your keyword research, go to the google keyword tool and type computer.  Here is what you will find in the results:

Step 2

Next, open a new browser window and type “computer” with the quotes in google to see how many search results:

Now, if  look at the top right of the screen, you see that there are 11,300,000 results for this keyword, meaning that this keyword is pretty competitive so you will want to be more specific.  Otherwise, you will be competing with over 11 million other sites.

Try one of the keywords given in the google keyword tool next.  Rinse and repeat until you find a keyword that gets enough searches and is not so competitive that it would be virtually impossible to get to the number one position.

Tip:  Try to find phrases that you would likely type in to find the information you are trying to rank for.

Example:  If you are selling computer monitors, what would you type into google to find exactly what type of monitor you are looking for?

NOTE:  As a General Rule, a good keyword is one that gets at least 500-1000 searches, and has less than 10,000 results in google.

Once you find a keyword that relates to your industry, start writing articles on this keyword and submit them with article submission tools!