What Are Keywords and How Do I Find Them?

One of the first things you need to learn about Affiliate Marketing is how to find keywords.

What they are, How they work, and What they can do for your website. Finding the right keywords is crucial to your work, and could be the biggest factor in determining whether your efforts will be successful or not, so no matter what your niche ideas, this is the one lesson you need to take notice of.  Why? Because how to find keywords is one of the most critical aspects of marketing online.

So what are Keywords?

Basically, keywords are the word or phrase that people type into a search engine to find what they are looking for.

If John Doe is looking for a specific item, instead of randomly roaming around, he would go to a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo and type in what he is looking for. What John Doe types in that single line of text is going to guide the search engines to return the best possible results for what John is looking for.

For example, John types “Valentine’s gift ideas for my wife” the moment he hits the enter key, Google or Bing will find sites that include those terms in their content and list them for John to choose from.  It looks much like the image at right and then John can scroll through to reading the snippets beneath each title to help him find what he is looking for.

The shaded area in pink are advertisements or paid placement ads. The real results begin just beneath that with what Google thinks are the most relevant and useful sites or pages on the internet to satisfy John’s need to find a gift for his wife for Valentine’s Day.

The way in which Google decides what pages to post at the top of the results is a complex algorithm of keywords, page quality, usefulness, site authority and probably a couple of hundred other factors that we may never know about.

The optimizing of your website and your content thereof, is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.  When you are writing your blog or niche website or any page that is on the internet, you need to keep your SEO in mind. The best way to do this is to write for your reader, write about things you know and are passionate about, something you have that your competition doesn’t.

The next  step is to think about what phrases the target customer/reader would type into a search when looking for your product or service you are writing about.

So in the case of John Doe up there, we know he is looking for “Valentine’s Gift Ideas’ for his wife. What else might he have in mind? Is he looking to spend a lot of money or a little? Does he want Jewelry, Candy or Flowers? Maybe even a surprise vacation cruise?

When writing for your readers, you have to know what they want and provide it.  But then you have to write about it in such a way that the search engines can tell your reader that you have exactly what they are looking for.

Sounds simple enough right? But we’re forgetting something.  Competition. There are a lot of websites out there that would love to help John find that perfect gift for his wife this Valentine’s Day.  They are working hard, just like you to make sure that John comes to their site first, by implementing the same or even better types of gifts, and of course implementing the SEO to tell the search engines to send them to their page. So how do you get John to notice your page or site? How exactly does one go about finding the right keywords?

Deliver Quality.

Satisfy his Needs. (But don’t forget about the search engines!)

Do your keyword research thoroughly!

How to Find Keywords

There are many tools on the market to show you exactly how to find keywords for your niche, that will not only help you get free traffic from the search engines, but assist you in finding the right keywords to use for your blog or niche website,  I have several that I use, and you can take a look at them below.

Jaaxy Keyword Tool

 

One of my favorite Keyword research tools is Jaaxy.

Jaaxy is a monthly subscription research platform. It can not only help you in finding the right keywords, but get an insight to the competition for those keywords.

Jaaxy can even check your rank for specific keyword phrases and so much more.  Researching your niche can be much easier and faster with the help of a tool like Jaaxy.

For pricing and more in-depth information about how Jaaxy can help show you how to find keywords, and how you can rank your site and its pages faster, just click the Try Jaaxy button and head on over and read the FAQs and sign up for the free trial.

Jaaxy also has an affiliate program. So while using the tool to help you get more visitors to your site, you can also share it with others and you can earn commissions when they sign up to get in on the action too. ( Yes, this is an affiliate link ).

Market Samurai

 Market Samurai is more advanced research tool for your affiliate marketing and probably one of the best tools to help teach you how to find keywords for your marketing efforts.

It offers more tools, and training than Jaaxy, and is great for when you are building a new niche site or really want to dig deep into your keyword research, competition, and in-depth analysis of your chosen niche.

Market Samurai can help you avoid the pitfalls of the inexperienced marketer. Many newbies make the mistake of picking the wrong keywords, going into markets with too little traffic or too little value, or trying to break into markets that are far too competitive.  The results – Failure.

You can try it for free, poke around with all the great tools and see if it can make the difference in your online marketing venture right from the start.

There is a pretty high price tag on this product.  But let me ask you this, How valuable is your time?  Would you rather spend months working on a niche only to find out that your keywords aren’t getting traffic? Is your topic in a weak market? Or maybe it is just too competitive?

Market Samurai’s tools can give you the foresight to not pursue the dead ends, and help you in finding that one niche that is going to help you be successful much quicker.

I’m cheap.  I don’t like to spend money on useless tools, and yes, I have done just that again and again in trying to establish my marketing business.  I can tell you that some of the most successful affiliate marketers I know USE Market Samurai for every niche, because it gives them results.

If you’re looking for a tool that guides you through how to find keywords, competition research, choosing a domain name, how to monetize your site, how to find or publish content with excellent customer service to back it up – then sign up for the free trial – test it out for yourself.

You will find yourself in much better position with Market Samurai in your corner.  This is another affiliate link, so yes, I would make a commission if you were to buy this tool.

Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis is another great keyword tool that I have used in the past. It does many of the same functions as the others, but is available in a limited Free format.

The link at right is to the Professional version (yep, its an affiliate link) but, you can get the Trial Version first and get your feet wet with their interface.  You can get an idea of how it works by checking out their video demonstration.

The pro version is priced comparably to Market Samurai, but I have only used the trial version which is a limited use set up.

In the Pro Version, you have unlimited project capability, in the trial you can only set up 5 projects.  Traffic Travis will show you your search engine rank for 500 of your keywords with the free version and unlimited in the Pro version.

There are quite a few differences in the versions in the volume and convenience of the tools available, but for those of you who are just getting started with your first or second website and are only beginning to learn about how to find keywords and how to make the most of the most profitable ones, the free version will help you in gaining a better understanding of how these tools work without having to pay a lot of money up front.

I would recommend you try the trial version first.  This introduces you to keyword research, allows you to play with searches and all of the terminology that goes along with learning the ropes of SEO.  Once you get a better understanding of how it all works, then you can find the more professional versions of keyword tools to enhance your growing website and niche.

Google Adwords Keyword Planner

The Google Adwords Keyword Planner is where essentially everyone gets their keywords from.  Why? Because Google dominates the search engines, and offers the tools that enable us to find and use the best keywords for our websites, niches, articles, just about everything done online is pretty much at the mercy of Google.

We don’t have to always be happy about that, but we do have to accept it.  That being said, the Adwords Keyword Planner is a free tool provided by Google, mostly for businesses to decide on what keywords they would like to advertise for.

Google offers paid advertisements on millions of websites through the Adsense program, and allows webmasters (or website creators) the ability to earn ad revenue by posting these ads and driving traffic for them.

The tool is useful to us as webmasters though, even if we are not interested in buying advertising through Google. But, while the tool is useful, it does not answer all of the needs of those building websites as far as competition, rank and other profit generation analysis tools that the other paid keyword tools can provide.

Google Keyword Planner can help you get started for free when you have a limited budget, but eventually you will find that you really want those other analytics to improve your results in gaining traffic and conversions.

These are just the few keyword research tools that I have used and currently use to help me to get from an idea to a profitable web post.  Before I learned how to find keywords, I was not making any money at all.  I would spend a lot of time on writing and designing pretty pages that no one ever saw.

In future posts I plan to go a bit deeper into the features of each of these tools, and I plan to make some videos to show you how each of them works.

If you don’t listen to anything else, please listen to this advice:

Learn How To Find Keywords!

They will make all the difference in your online marketing efforts.  I promise.

 

 

 

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