ii) I have then copied each term and entered it into my chart as shown. I have then entered the number of times each was searched into the 'Demand' column.

(In this example, the top searched term was - 'article flighti*******al****keyword search****test' . Now this search term was either the result of a 'bot or someone purposely searching for the term in order to move their own site up the listings. One of the alogorithms the search engines use is that of how many times a term is searched. Many times, when using the Overture Tool used here, you will return results such as these. As in everything else, common sense plays an important part. Do not just blindly follow the formula or entirely hand over your own judgement to st

The 'Master Keyword Chart' that we will create, will, however, fulfill many other functions that will make a definite impact on the effectiveness of our web-sites.

Now we all know that attempts to 'fool' the search engines are doomed to failure 99% of the time. The alogorithms have already been set to scupper your efforts, or if they haven't, they soon will be.

Nonetheless, there are many legitamate, effective ways of optomizing your site such as;

a.. creating well researched meta-tags;

b.. the trading of relevant, quality links;

c.. posting of articles, network posts & advertisements for inward links;

d.. referencing other websites for outbound links; and, most importantly;

a.. filling your pages with compelling, informative content.

The one thing that ties together all these methods, and many more, is KEYWORDS.

Everything a 'spiderbot' (a search engine's little hunter) does is guided by their search for the best keywords that match a search-term that a user enters everytime they perform a search.

With so many web pages (over 1 billion) competing for those prized No.1 spots, however, it pays us to spend some considerable time researching which keywords are worth trying to 'optimize'.

By using a very simple, free tool called the Keyword Selector Tool from Overture;-

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ , along with the search engine that we want to be placed highly on, we can find which specific 'keyword terms' will bring us the highest number of visitors, whilst offering the least amount of competition.

The result will be a 'Master Keyword Chart'.

1. Creating a 'Master Keyword Chart'.

This can be done in your choice of a database, spreadsheet or text file. I prefer a spreadsheet, but this is a matter of personal preference.

I don't recommend using a basic text editor (such as Notepad or Wordpad) as this will limit the functionality available and calculating the formulas that will be covered later, will be very time consuming. If however, you feel more comfortable using this, you can still produce just as good a chart.

(You can download an excellent free, open-source office suite at OpenOffice.org which comes with both a database and a spreadsheet program).

Using the spreadsheet example, you first need to create 4 columns as illustrated below:-

KEYWORD TERM SUPPLY DEMAND USE-ABILITY

article keyword 511 25 20

marketing keyword article 55,000 35 1571

i) In this example I have used the 'search phrase' or 'keyword term' of 'keyword article' and I created it by;

i) Opening the free Overture Keyword Selector Tool and in the box provided, entered my 'keyword term'. After a few seconds, depending on your connection, a list of all related 'keyword terms' that have been searched for in the course of a month (normally 2 months ago) will be shown. The numbers to the left are the amount of times these terms were searched.

I recommend that you start with a 'keyword term' that is relatively generic as it is often surprising to find what people search for. You may miss a well suited phrase if you are too specific to begin with.

ii) I have then copied each term and entered it into my chart as shown. I have then entered the number of times each was searched into the 'Demand' column.

(In this example, the top searched term was - 'article flighti*******al****keyword search****test' . Now this search term was either the result of a 'bot or someone purposely searching for the term in order to move their own site up the listings. One of the alogorithms the search engines use is that of how many times a term is searched. Many times, when using the Overture Tool used here, you will return results such as these. As in everything else, common sense plays an important part. Do not just blindly follow the formula or entirely hand over your own judgement to sta

a.. filling your pages with compelling, informative content.

The one thing that ties together all these methods, and many more, is KEYWORDS.

Everything a 'spiderbot' (a search engine's little hunter) does is guided by their search for the best keywords that match a search-term that a user enters everytime they perform a search.

With so many web pages (over 1 billion) competing for those prized No.1 spots, however, it pays us to spend some considerable time researching which keywords are worth trying to 'optimize'.

By using a very simple, free tool called the Keyword Selector Tool from Overture;-

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ , along with the search engine that we want to be placed highly on, we can find which specific 'keyword terms' will bring us the highest number of visitors, whilst offering the least amount of competition.

The result will be a 'Master Keyword Chart'.

1. Creating a 'Master Keyword Chart'.

This can be done in your choice of a database, spreadsheet or text file. I prefer a spreadsheet, but this is a matter of personal preference.

I don't recommend using a basic text editor (such as Notepad or Wordpad) as this will limit the functionality available and calculating the formulas that will be covered later, will be very time consuming. If however, you feel more comfortable using this, you can still produce just as good a chart.

(You can download an excellent free, open-source office suite at OpenOffice.org which comes with both a database and a spreadsheet program).

Using the spreadsheet example, you first need to create 4 columns as illustrated below:-

KEYWORD TERM SUPPLY DEMAND USE-ABILITY

article keyword 511 25 20

marketing keyword article 55,000 35 1571

i) In this example I have used the 'search phrase' or 'keyword term' of 'keyword article' and I created it by;

i) Opening the free Overture Keyword Selector Tool and in the box provided, entered my 'keyword term'. After a few seconds, depending on your connection, a list of all related 'keyword terms' that have been searched for in the course of a month (normally 2 months ago) will be shown. The numbers to the left are the amount of times these terms were searched.

I recommend that you start with a 'keyword term' that is relatively generic as it is often surprising to find what people search for. You may miss a well suited phrase if you are too specific to begin with.

ii) I have then copied each term and entered it into my chart as shown. I have then entered the number of times each was searched into the 'Demand' column.

(In this example, the top searched term was - 'article flighti*******al****keyword search****test' . Now this search term was either the result of a 'bot or someone purposely searching for the term in order to move their own site up the listings. One of the alogorithms the search engines use is that of how many times a term is searched. Many times, when using the Overture Tool used here, you will return results such as these. As in everything else, common sense plays an important part. Do not just blindly follow the formula or entirely hand over your own judgement to st

The result will be a 'Master Keyword Chart'.

1. Creating a 'Master Keyword Chart'.

This can be done in your choice of a database, spreadsheet or text file. I prefer a spreadsheet, but this is a matter of personal preference.

I don't recommend using a basic text editor (such as Notepad or Wordpad) as this will limit the functionality available and calculating the formulas that will be covered later, will be very time consuming. If however, you feel more comfortable using this, you can still produce just as good a chart.

(You can download an excellent free, open-source office suite at OpenOffice.org which comes with both a database and a spreadsheet program).

Using the spreadsheet example, you first need to create 4 columns as illustrated below:-

KEYWORD TERM SUPPLY DEMAND USE-ABILITY

article keyword 511 25 20

marketing keyword article 55,000 35 1571

i) In this example I have used the 'search phrase' or 'keyword term' of 'keyword article' and I created it by;

i) Opening the free Overture Keyword Selector Tool and in the box provided, entered my 'keyword term'. After a few seconds, depending on your connection, a list of all related 'keyword terms' that have been searched for in the course of a month (normally 2 months ago) will be shown. The numbers to the left are the amount of times these terms were searched.

I recommend that you start with a 'keyword term' that is relatively generic as it is often surprising to find what people search for. You may miss a well suited phrase if you are too specific to begin with.

ii) I have then copied each term and entered it into my chart as shown. I have then entered the number of times each was searched into the 'Demand' column.

(In this example, the top searched term was - 'article flighti*******al****keyword search****test' . Now this search term was either the result of a 'bot or someone purposely searching for the term in order to move their own site up the listings. One of the alogorithms the search engines use is that of how many times a term is searched. Many times, when using the Overture Tool used here, you will return results such as these. As in everything else, common sense plays an important part. Do not just blindly follow the formula or entirely hand over your own judgement to st

KEYWORD TERM SUPPLY DEMAND USE-ABILITY

article keyword 511 25 20

marketing keyword article 55,000 35 1571

i) In this example I have used the 'search phrase' or 'keyword term' of 'keyword article' and I created it by;

i) Opening the free Overture Keyword Selector Tool and in the box provided, entered my 'keyword term'. After a few seconds, depending on your connection, a list of all related 'keyword terms' that have been searched for in the course of a month (normally 2 months ago) will be shown. The numbers to the left are the amount of times these terms were searched.

I recommend that you start with a 'keyword term' that is relatively generic as it is often surprising to find what people search for. You may miss a well suited phrase if you are too specific to begin with.

ii) I have then copied each term and entered it into my chart as shown. I have then entered the number of times each was searched into the 'Demand' column.

(In this example, the top searched term was - 'article flighti*******al****keyword search****test' . Now this search term was either the result of a 'bot or someone purposely searching for the term in order to move their own site up the listings. One of the alogorithms the search engines use is that of how many times a term is searched. Many times, when using the Overture Tool used here, you will return results such as these. As in everything else, common sense plays an important part. Do not just blindly follow the formula or entirely hand over your own judgement to st

ii) I have then copied each term and entered it into my chart as shown. I have then entered the number of times each was searched into the 'Demand' column.

(In this example, the top searched term was - 'article flighti*******al****keyword search****test' . Now this search term was either the result of a 'bot or someone purposely searching for the term in order to move their own site up the listings. One of the alogorithms the search engines use is that of how many times a term is searched. Many times, when using the Overture Tool used here, you will return results such as these. As in everything else, common sense plays an important part. Do not just blindly follow the formula or entirely hand over your own judgement to statistics.

iii) This search term only returned 4 phrases, which is very low, but fortunately, useful for use in this article. Most searches will return a much larger number.

As you go down the list, only copy those terms that you feel would have a place in your web-page content.

If for instance, you are writing about Birmingham UK, keyword terms that contain Birmingham, Alabama, would have no relevance. Ignore these.

iv) We now have our list of terms and the demand for their searches. Next, we need to know how much competition exists for each term. open your favorite search engine and enter each search term.

N.B. When you enter the terms, be sure to enclose them in " ".

If you just enter the words as on their own, you will be given ALL the sites containing the words, anywhere, and in any order. to illustrate - 'keyword article' above, entered without quotation marks, returned - 30,600,000 compared to 55,000 when using the quotations. you can be pretty sure that all of the 55,000 were relatively well placed in the 30,600,000 since they had the actual phrase as entered.

We are targeting for the top spot, so are only interested ion those other sites that also have the exact phrase.

v) At the top of the search engines window, you will see something like 'Results 1 - 10 of about 55,000'. It is the '55,000' that we now want to enter into the 'Supply' column alongside each keyword term.

vi) Now, before we apply the simple formula, we need to give our common-sense some more exercise. You may have some 'terms' that are showing hundreds of thousands, or even millions, that are optimized for that term. These would be unrealistic for many of us to try and position highly against, so can be deleted straight away. Conversely, there may be some terms that whilst are in very low demand - under 50, for instance. However, these are at times the most profitable.

Let me explain with a different example;-

Entering 'tableware' into the Keyword Selector Tool, I find that 'country moose tableware' had 44 people search for it. Now I have no idea what 'country moose tableware' is, but let us go with it.

On a search in Google, I find that there are only 13 sites returned for this term, and they are all suppliers.

If I can then find an affiliate and/or dropship deal with one or two of them and I write some good copy on 'country moose tableware', what are the chances of my site getting into the top 3 of the page. now only 44 people have searched, but with such a specific term, the chances of these people looking to buy are very high, resulting in excellent conversion, which, in the end, is what we are all looking for.

Anyhow, back on with our chart. We are almost done.

vii) Now we have eliminated all terms that have just too much competition, made a seperate note of any especially specific terms, and have a list of all others. We can now, simply divide the 'supply' figures by the 'demand' figures, entering the results in the 'use-ability' column. We then sort the results in ascending order. (This is where a spreadsheet is particularly useful).

The 'keyword terms' with the lowest 'use-ability' figures are the ones we are most interested in. These are the ones with the least competition, whilst being searched the most often. In the 'keyword article' example