Are you having trouble finding keywords to power your site?

No problem!

Every site owner needs to pay attention to keywords and what are the best ones to focus on in their pages and copy that will help drive traffic to them. Now of course when we say keywords one should realize that this encompasses phrases as well. Golf is a keyword. Golf vacation New Zealand is a keyword phrase. You have to think in terms of keyword phrases. This can be where the gold is in them thar Internet hills.

There are many great keyword research tools out there, but we recommend you start with the free tools before you get yourself into the more high powered ones that cost money each month. We use several of these tools in our keyword research.

Wordtracker has been an industry favorite for several years now. It is subscription service that has historically provided a free trial or a low cost per day usage option. It is a powerful tool once you learn how to use it properly. Wordtracker now has a free tool you can use and a report on how to do proper keyword research. Cool eh? Give it a try. Wordtracker

One of the other free tools for keyword research for your web site is Keyword Discovery. Keyword Discovery is a subscription service like Wordtracker buy they offer a free trial program as well. : Keyword Discovery

One tool that has come on the scene recently is The Dowser. They offer a free version to try out and we recommend you give it a look. The Dowser

Your main niche that you want to build your site around has to center on one specific keyword that you have found that has great numbers. You will be building a web site here that is designed to get you as much free traffic from the search engines as possible. Free organic search engine traffic is great, although it is not the only way you will want to build your site traffic over time.

Each page of your site will be focused on one specific keyword, and no page is more important than your home page.

So, how do we measure what a great keyword is?

1) It has a demand of at least 30,000. If the traffic isn't there, it's not worth competing for. What if it's a little less? Well, if the supply and competition are weak, then that means you have a better chance to dominate, and that might work. There is definitely some gray area here.

2) Supply is no more than 2 to 3 times the demand. The whole idea here is to get into a market quickly and easily. When you are more experienced, then feel free to go after more challenging markets. For now, we want one that we have a great shot at being a leader in right away. That means having a reasonable amount of competition for those search engine rankings compared to demand.

3) You can tie a lot of other great keywords to it. Sometimes this step can be tough. Get creative. You will be building a whole site around this one central theme, so this is important. Once you have your central keyword, everything else starts falling into place.

For now, here's what you need to do: Find 20 to 25 great keywords on your chosen niche. If you do have your niche, then let's get started! You need to find 20 to 25 keywords to form the foundation of your site.

What do I mean? You should know that each page of the site you are about to start building will be focused on one keyword each. So, we want to find a list of great keywords, that you will build the first 20 to 25 pages of your site on. Odds are, you already have many of these. Remember that brainstorming you've already done? How many of those are really good? Heck you may already have this lesson done. So, now you're probably asking "How can I tell a great keyword to use as one of the first ones for my site?"

Load up your keyword research tool and try to give it a headstart on giving you good keywords to work with for your site. Don't load it up with some top level broad term like golf and expect to be able to drill down easily to keywords you can compete on in the search engines. Make a little effort to brainstorm the food you feed the tool and give it something more focused. For instance "golf vacations" or "left handed golf lessons". Then hit go. Sit back and gather the results.

We recommend you save your results in both text files and spreadsheet format files. That way you back up and you have different ways of using them. A spreadsheet version can be used to sort the words based on criteria while a text formatted list can be easily cut and pasted into other applications to utilize your keywords.

Look for the "long tail" keywords that you can rank well on in short order. By long tail we mean four or five word keyword phrases that have low competition and some traffic. These can be real gems for your business building efforts.