What are Keywords?

Keywords are nothing more than the words that people type into the various search engines when they are looking for a product, service, or information. Let’s say someone was interested in going fly fishing for the first time, they’d probably head over to a search engine and type in the words “beginning fly fishing”, and that would be their keyword phrase, also known as a long-tail keyword. Keywords are broken up into two categories: short-tail keywords of 1-2 words in length, and long-tail keywords having a phrase length of 3-5 words.

Short-tail Keywords

These keywords have the most traffic and the most competition, and are very broad in their appeal. Take for example the keyword “insurance”, Google shows that this keyword is searched for over 55 million times per month, (globally) – that’s a lot of searches! Let’s drill down a little and try “cheap insurance”; Google shows that to be 1.5 million searches per month. As you can see, one and two word keyword phrases are so general that they appeal to a large segment of the populace. Of course, you are probably thinking “that’s great! I want lots of searches!” and yes you do, but one and two word keywords also have massive amounts of competition, probably more than you can take on in the very beginning of your affiliate career. The top 3 sites listed in Google for the term “insurance” are AllState, StateFarm, and Geico – and I’m betting you don’t have the millions of dollars necessary to compete with them head-to-head. Even the term “cheap insurance” would be too much, Google shows over 1.5 million competing pages for that keyword!

Long-tail Keywords

This is where you begin to find the gold. Let’s stick with insurance and see what we can find. If we narrow our search to “cheap insurance in california” we find that our competition has dropped to only 283,000 competing pages – now that’s more like it! And Google shows that this phrase has a monthly search volume of 12,100 searches. That doesn’t seem like much compared to the 55 million that are searching for “insurance”, but these 12,100 people are targeted buyers. Think about it, they aren’t just browsing around reading about insurance in general, they are looking for something specific, they want cheap insurance in California; so if you were there to offer them advice on which carrier to pick they would be a lot more inclined to use your affiliate link to purchase.

Now that you know what keywords are, my next post will teach you about how to research them and use them to determine if you have a good niche or not. We will also use them to set up our sites content in a way that makes it easy for both the search engines and the readers to find what they are looking for.

p.s. If you want to get a head start on keyword research, head over to Market Samurai and grab a free copy of their fantastic keyword research tool, and check out their videos – it’s good stuff!



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