Keywords are the most important to the Internet Marketing?

Why should you care about your Keywords when you do your Internet Marketing?

Keywords are essential to your online success. You must get your keywords right or it's game over before you even get started. This is because keywords are the most important element of your online marketíng. It can't be emphasized enough, especially to beginning online webmasters or marketers, choosing the right profitable keywords will largely determine whether or not you succeed with your online endeavors.

What are Keywords?
Keywords are the words or phrases someone types into a search engine to find what they're looking for on the web. Some keywords or phrases are valuable/profitable, while others are virtually worthless. Profitable keywords are the ones that convert into a sale, a lead or potential client for your company or product. These are the words someone is searching in order to buy a product. Someone searching for "iPhone from Appl" is probably in the market to buy a iPhone and could turn out to be very profitable for the right website or business.

Profitable keywords are the ones where the searcher is in the right "mind-set" or frame of mind to buy what they're searching for on the web. Tailor your marketing online to target these profitable keywords and it can turn into a success.
So what's the whole process for finding or choosing profitable keywords to use in your marketing? Lets look at some ways to proceed:

Number of Keyword Searches?
What you need to do is to find out how many searches are made for your chosen keywords each month. Simply use WordTracker or a site like SEOBook. These will give you a preliminary number of searches made each month for your keyword. Highly popular, well-searched keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches each month will be extremely hard to rank for because you will have stiff competition from major companies with limitless resources.
You have to pick less popular keywords that get only a couple of hundred of searches each day because your chances of getting on the first page greatly increases. But don't get fixated on the number of searches, some keyword phrases that only get four or five searches daily, can still be very profitable.
For serious keyword research in a particular niche market You cøuld use Brad Callen's Keyword Elite which is professionally designed software that makes all your keyword research so much easier. But there are plenty of free keyword tools you can use. One handy keyword tool is Google Adwords external suggestion tool which will help you find valuable keywords.

Commercial Intent of Keywords?
But how do you know if a keyword is profitable? One convenient tool is from MSN which helps you with "Detecting Online Commercial Intention" of keywords. Just type in a keyword and it will give you a percentage or probability your keyword query has commercial benefit or intent.

Conversion Rate of Keywords?
Once you have your chosen keywords in place, next you want to have a landing page that converts those keywords or traffic from those keywords into buyers or leads for your online business. This is another crucial element of your online marketíng - you must have a landing page or content/site that converts into a sale or you obviously won't make any revenue.
Keep in mind, if you're into affiliate marketing, you main goal is not to sell but to "pre-sell" your products or services. One effective way I have found to do this is to give potential customers/clients valuable information they can use in making their final purchasing choice. Comparison sites do well, as do review sites, top ten sites... potential customers use the Internet and keywords to not only find products but more so, to find information on those products. Your goal should be to provide this valuable information to make their task a little bit easier for them and they will reward you with a sale.

Long-Tail Keywords?
Long-Tail keywords are simply that: long three or four word phrases that searchers use to find what they're looking for on the web. Because they are highly specific, long-tail keywords have proven to have better conversion rates than general keywords. This is also just common sense, someone searching for a "2005 ford mustang convertible" may just be in the right mind-set to buy such a vehicle; as compared to someone searching for a more general keyword phrase such as "sports cars."
Study your website traffic logs religiously to find long-tail keywords that turn into a sale. Target these long-tail keywords in your marketing. Even buy PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in the three major search engines - Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing and MicroSoft AdCenter - for these valuable/profitable keywords.
And build higher rankings in organic search for these long-tail keyword phrases. It's really not that difficult for long phrases, especially if they're related to your site; many times you can reach the top spot in a matter of days, especially in Google.

How to Rank High for Your Chosen Profitable Keywords?
Of course, the million dollar question is: HOW do you rank in the top spot for your chosen keywords? I believe the key to ranking high in the search engines (especially Google) is to be persistent in building your rankings for your keywords. Take a long-term view or approach, sometimes it may take months, even years, to rank in the top Five for your highly competitive keywords.
The best strategy is to "stick to it" and keep building relevant links to your keyword landing page. Create related blogs with valuable content linking back to your keywords. Write keyword related articles and distribute them all over the web. Create Google Alerts for your keywords and then place comments/links in the newly formed pages on the web that Google is indexing.
Be pro-active, download the SEOQuake toolbar and find your main keyword competitors. Check out their links and then go out and get the same links. Write better, higher quality content than your main competitors because Google always rewards great content. Plus, use the free Addthis.com button and let your visitors bookmark your great content in all the social bookmark sites and build your keyword links for you.
Do keyworded Press Releases with your embedded links and spread them all over the web. Get these Press Releases into Google news and other important places on the web. PRWeb.com is really a great place for your press releases since you can embed your keywords in your links.
If you can try to get your most important keywords in your domain name. Many SEO experts argue the merits of this but from my own experience and marketing - it is much easier to rank high for your keywords if you have them in the domain name. Again, it is just common sense, if you have your main keyword in the domain, this keyword is obviously telling the search engines this is what your site is all about. I have even bought domains and created sites specifically around certain keywords just to rank high.
Always remember, you have to be persistent, I have been fighting some keyword battles for over four or five years! For really profitable keywords, it can be a constant struggle to remain on the first page, but the trick is not to give up, just keep fighting away at your competitors. Persistence usually pays off in the end and those profitable keywords will have your links in the top spot. Make ranking high for those profitable keywords your number one marketing strategy. Concentrate all your marketing efforts towards getting plenty of quality traffic for those keywords and you will succeed online

Software Pirates Tell Their Stories in BSA Campaign by PC Magazine: Yahoo! Tech

Software Pirates Tell Their Stories in BSA Campaign by PC Magazine: Yahoo! Tech

What does a software pirate look like? Anyone. And that's the new message of the Business Software Alliance, which asked five convicted software pirates to tell their stories.

Google's Schmidt Talks Privacy, Internet Domination by PC Magazine: Yahoo! Tech

Google's Schmidt Talks Privacy, Internet Domination by PC Magazine: Yahoo! Tech

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website | How-To | Smashing Magazine

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website | How-To | Smashing Magazine

What to do when your CMS system is ready for launch. Check some more important tasks...

New feature from Linkedin.

LinkedIn launched a new feature that would allow members of groups to share and discuss news articles. Last week, the professional social network offered group owners and managers another way to provide relevant news to their group by way of sharing feeds.

Managers can now create customs news feeds by adding an RSS feed, an Atom feed, or just a Web site URL.
According to a recent blog post, the idea is to give group members a "comprehensive news digest" on LinkedIn that will potentially help them discover new blogs and sources.
While at first glance the idea of incorporating feeds into the professional networking service doesn't seem particularly interesting - many other networks have already enabled this sharing and communicating option, it may just be a great way to introduce feeds to a more mainstream market.
Sites like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc., have always relied on participation from a tech savvy audience; those who are already familiar with feeds, and who for the most part have already created their own customized feeds, so that the content, more than the technology is the most important component.
LinkedIn however is a little different. Its audience doesn't comprise solely of the tech or Web savvy; many are just ordinary folk wanting to find other like minded folk for professional purposes. With this new feature, it just may be that LinkedIn will bring the feed to the masses.

SEO is Becoming More Important In Long Terms

It's a small business owner's dream to be the first result in Google when someone types in a word like "shoes." The resulting traffic stats and sales numbers would be incredible. However, it seems that small businesses might do much better by optimizing for queries involving more than one word.

Cost and feasibility need to be considered, of course - it's a rare small business that can pay for a site capable of competing with those owned by big corporations. But there's more to the situation than that.
It's in the land of three-, four-, and five-word searches that more and more people are spending their time, and together, 45.4 percent of the searches Hitwise has tracked so far this year fall into these categories.

Focusing your search engine optimization efforts on longer queries is something to think about instead of straining to create interesting one-word product names, then. Heck, attain a high ranking now, and maybe you'll even have a hold on it when the Reeboks of the world branch out.

SEO is Becoming More Important In Long Terms

It's a small business owner's dream to be the first result in Google when someone types in a word like "shoes." The resulting traffic stats and sales numbers would be incredible. However, it seems that small businesses might do much better by optimizing for queries involving more than one word.

Cost and feasibility need to be considered, of course - it's a rare small business that can pay for a site capable of competing with those owned by big corporations. But there's more to the situation than that.
It's in the land of three-, four-, and five-word searches that more and more people are spending their time, and together, 45.4 percent of the searches Hitwise has tracked so far this year fall into these categories.

Focusing your search engine optimization efforts on longer queries is something to think about instead of straining to create interesting one-word product names, then. Heck, attain a high ranking now, and maybe you'll even have a hold on it when the Reeboks of the world branch out.

Google Offers A Peek Into Its Internal Eye-Tracking Studies

Google Offers A Peek Into Its Internal Eye-Tracking Studies

There’s an interesting post today on the Official Google Blog that gives a glimpse inside the company’s usability and eye-tracking studies — tests that help Google determine what their search results pages should look like.

Travel companies are going for Twitter.

Hotels, airlines, airports and other travel companies are joining the Twitter community, to pitch services, update travel conditions and respond directly to the individual needs of customers. They're finding the mobile nature of the technology is ideal for talking to travelers. Read More..

PPC marketing in a down Economy

The economy’s downturn has finally reached the online advertising world.

When you stop marketing, you lose touch with your clients. You stop understanding what is important to your consumer base. Many believe that customer service and marketing is more important in a recession than at any other time. If you lose touch with our client base, how can you see the trends your clients are facing? Red More....

Google and Niche Services

Google and Niche Services: "Google continues to end projects, the most recent one being AdWords for Print. The blog post that explains the decision shows the big picture at Google:"

Microsoft and their missed opportunities With paid search.

Microsoft Bid to Beat Google Builds on a History of Misses from the Wall Street Journal has a very detailed look at some of the mistakes Microsoft made early on in the paid search space. The piece goes through the failure of Microsoft’s original Keyword ad platform, named bCentral Keywords, which was discontinued in early 2000. It then discusses the fact that they did not purchase Overture, which Yahoo acquired in 2003. Followed by the failed attempts at buying Yahoo this past year.

we all know Microsoft has made many mistakes in the past with search opportunities. But the most interesting pieces of the article is that Ballmer still wants the deal with Yahoo. It is also very interesting to see that Microsoft’s new search ad platform, adCenter, was code named “Moonshot.” Many advertisers love the feature set within adCenter, so the technology is not the reason adCenter is not competing. As Andrew Goodman notes, it is about market share. Advertisers go where the customers are and the customers are at Google, not Microsoft.

Google is testing new AdWords budget option

Google have been offering selected clients a new AdWords budgeting option called "Timeframe". This allows advertisers to choose a monthly budgeting option which allocates budgets across a calendar month according to traffic demands. The monthly budgeting option has only been made available to selected advertisers during a beta testing period.

Most advertisers would be familiar with how daily budgets work, where a set spending limit is applied each day. One of the shortfalls of this approach means that on lower traffic days, you might have some unused budget leftover that could have been used on higher traffic days.

Monthly budgeting eliminates this issue by automatically adjusting your budget each day to match traffic demands. From the AdWords Help Center:

With a monthly budget, Google will adjust your budget automatically each day to meet traffic demand while still respecting your budget for the calendar month. If you've seen this on your AdWords account, let us know what you think!

Google Releases Top Tactics for difficult Times

As we continue to hear news about an economic recession, the good folks at Google have decided to help you out.

They have recently announced the release of the "Top Tactics for Tough Times" centered around making the most of Google Adwords.

Here are the Google AdWords experts' top recommendations for making the most out of Adwords.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use value-related keywords
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant
4. Do not waste money on irrelevant clicks
5. Make it easy for customers to buy
6. Focus your money on your high performers.

The article goes into more details on these points, so if you would like to read more, then check it out here.



http://www.google.com/adwords/tactics2008/

Inside AdWords: Our Top 10 for 2008

Inside AdWords: Google's Top 10 for 2008

Predictions for 2009

Each year, the blogosphere is flooded with predictions for the next. It’s time to look into 2009 for one of the most exciting, and unpredictable, companies in existence — Google.

Google Apps will continue to gain momentum in the Enterprise
The longer the economy stays bad, the more attractive Google Apps begins to look for businesses that currently license Microsoft products. It costs an incredible amount of money to legally run things like Microsoft Exchange and Office in-house. Google’s Enterprise business will grow at Microsoft’s expense this coming year.

Google Chrome makes deal with OEM’s, and snags a significant chunk of the browser market
It would be almost impossible for Google to dethrone Internet Explorer in 2009 (or even Firefox for that matter). Google will, however, make a deal with OEM’s to have Google Chrome installed, and set as the “default” browser on new computers. If this happens, it will have a significant impact on Chrome usage in 2009. We could see Google snag as much as 10 to 15 percent of the browser market in the coming year.

GOOG will gain some of the ground it lost on wall street
Overall, this was a terrible year for Google — just as it was with almost every other company because of the economy. As investors become more comfortable with Google’s dominant position, and the need for companies to keep their online marketing budgets relatively static, the share price should close in the green for 2009 (but of course, if I could accurately predict this type of thing, I’d probably be on a beach somewhere, so take it with a grain of salt).

Predictions for Google's 2009

Predictions for Google's 2009

Google Hot Trends, Christmas Edition 2008

Google Hot Trends, Christmas Edition 2008

A New Redesign of Google Reader

Google Reader has just launched a major redesign to its interface, addressing many of the top concerns of users of the popular RSS reader.
In addition to simply looking way more clean and inviting, Google has introduced more collapsible navigation options, a new section for friends, additional feed bundles, and perhaps most welcoming to power users: the option to hide those intimidating unread items counts, which can quickly swell to hundreds or the dreaded “1,000+” when one spends more than a few hours away from the service.
The “hide” options are handled on a per subscription basis, creating a lot of flexibility in terms of deciding how overwhelmed you want to feel inside of Google Reader. When there are new items to see, the links will still be bold, but the number will not show.

The Google Reader team has a full explanation of the changes available on their blog.

Google’s New PPC Keyword Tool

The tool helps AdWords advertisers identify new keyword opportunities that aren’t currently being used in their AdWords ad campaigns.

Based on the URL and initial keywords you enter, the Search-Based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas that are relevant and specific to your website. I’ve only been playing around with it for a few days, but it’s already helped me pinpoint some keywords I’ve been overlooking in our PPC campaigns.
Two lists of keywords are generated when you enter your details. The first one is a list of keywords related to your page, meaning keywords that Google has extracted from your page copy. The second list relates to the specific search words and phrases that you entered in the search field.

For each list, the tool displays the following:

The average amount of traffic a search term receives each month on Google.com (and other Google search properties, such as google.co.uk)

The approximate amount of competition you face for ad placement on these queries
A suggested bid amount for the keyword/s that may place your ad in the top three spots of the page

The frequency with which an ad for your website appeared for a given query
The frequency with which your ad appeared in the first page of search results for a given query

The page on your website that best matched the keyword suggestion (if applicable)
The tool is better than prior versions of both the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, for two major reasons:

1) The bid suggestions give you an instant ballpark cost of adding keywords to your campaign based on actual competitor bids and you can pick, choose and export the ones you like into an Excel spreadsheet from the main report area. This time-saving functionality has been sorely missing from other PPC keyword tools.

2) By displaying the pages on your site that best match the search queries, the tool helps you choose the best landing pages for your ads without tiresome allocation by hand.