To know how to make money online using keywords as your base, you need to know them properly. This is one of the most tried and tested laws of marketing on the Internet. If you know the buzzwords that will send the customers flocking to your site, your ability to make money online is pretty much guaranteed. Researching on your keywords helps you in:

• You need to find a market that is niche hungry.
• You also need to come up with a product to sell to them.
• You need to come up with a sales copy which is great enough to convince them to buy your product.
• You need to optimize your website for the search engines in such a way so that the visitors can easily find your site.
• You can come up with new ideas for products that will help you expand your current customer base.

However, searching and using keywords can be a gamble. People can be unpredictable at all times and their choice of keywords can be an endless riddle. For instance, if you are planning to earn money online by selling an e-Book on “how to shoot”, more often than not “how to shoot” may not be the most appropriate keywords. Instead, using keywords such as “learning how to hold a gun” can work wonders.

There are numerous Keyword tools that you can use for generating good revenue. Some of them are listed as below:

• Market Samurai- This is my favourite keyword tool of them all. It works fast and is as accurate as anything else I’ve seen out there. It also includes numerous other modules to help with your site rankings, including a rank checker and content finder. The Samurai guys are constanly upgrading the software and making improvements.

• BeBiz- This is another one of the most opted for keyword tools amongst webmasters. It is capable of automatically integrating the keyword research results into all aspects of the business. This makes it easier for the person to earn money online.
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool- The best part about this tool is it is free and plus it is hosted by Google. There you go! Two reasons right there! One more reason to use Google Adwords includes the information from the Pay Per Click and comes into Google’s own real-time database.

Once the list of keywords has been accumulated, that is not the end of the story. Listed below are some points that you can use to help your keywords survive in the jungle of keywords:

• Start off with a word that describes an interest or a passion
• You need to create a list of synonyms to supplement that word
• Combining the synonyms with the word “how” to generate a problematic statement
• Analyzing the demand for a particular keyword using the keyword tools
• Accumulating the similar keywords according to the purpose of the web master
• Looking for phrases as keywords, as in complete sentences that can double up as keywords.

A prospect coming in to your website from a long-tail keyword is often more valuable than someone searching for something generic, because:
• They are further down the buying cycle and have done adequate research.
• The customer knows exactly what he’s looking for.
• Conversion rates are typically better with long-tail keywords.
It is typically very hard to locate long-tail keywords that have search traffic in order to optimize your website to rank for them.
None of the popular keyword research tools including Wordtracker, Google Adwords Tool provide in-depth analysis on long tail terms with traffic.
In this post, I’ll be showing you five easy ways to locate long-tail keywords that have search traffic and can help you become more profitable:

1. Google Suggest Scrape
Google provides keyword suggestions when you type in a key phrase into the search box, the suggestions that you see on top are typically keywords that have more search traffic than the ones down below.
A great way to find long-tail traffic that converts is using the google suggest scraper tool developed by thinkpragmatic.com
This tool scrapes the suggestions provided by Google for a root keyword and also appends the alphabets ‘a to z’ for that keyword to scrape more useful long-tail terms.

2. Books and Magazines
It’s always useful to read popular industry books and magazines and scoop out new articles. These articles often contain popular jargon, terms and concepts that you can use to optimize for.
Since these terms are published in industry books and magazines, they already have search traffic that you can exploit. If you’re the first to optimize for these terms as soon as they’re published, you have a better chance of dominating the first spot in the search engines.

3. Google Blog Search
Google Blog Search is a great way to save time on research by using other people’s long-tail research as references. If you enter a keyword into Google Blog Search, it shows you the latest related blog posts that have been published across the world wide web.
Using this tool, you can find out what long-tails other people in your industry are going after and optimize for them.

4. Large Ecommerce Sites
If you’re trying to find long-tail keywords for your ecommerce sites, a large ecommerce site will be a great source of long-tail product terms to optimize.
Sites like eBay and Amazon have a huge catalog of items that you could browse to come up with long-tail product keywords as well as topics for articles to write and optimize.

5. SpyFu, Market Samurai and other competitive research tools
Tools like SpyFu and Market Samurai allow you to search for a domain or keyword and see what other keywords users are advertising relevant to the domain or keyword.
These usually contain plenty of long-tails that you can use for your campaigns.
More than selecting these long-tail terms, its also important to track these using a powerful analytics tool to see if they’re generating positive return on investment.
It is advisable and easier to optimize a keyword that generates revenue to rank better rather than try and research a new one which may or may not produce positive results.

Performing search engine optimisation to rank your website in the search engines on certain keywords is a long and often expensive task. This is why it’s imperative that when you are finally ranked on the first page of google that those keywords are bringing in revenue for you, otherwise you have wasted a lot of time and effort for very little monetary return.

So how do you know which keywords are better to rank on than others? Or, more specifically, which keywords are going to have more commercial value to you if you rank well on them? Well, I recently purchased an SEO and keyword research tool called Market Samurai that has loads of really cool features that most of the other tools out there don’t have. Take a look at the video below where it is explained how you can compare similar keywords to find which one has the most commercial value. Using this you can concentrate your efforts on ranking for keywords that will bring in more revenue to your website.

I decided that before I blindly ran off trying to drive traffic from here, there and everywhere it would be a good idea to do a little keyword research first. Afterall this is a long term plan, so knowing which keywords I want to rank well with, and that I have a chance at ranking well with, will help me with my overall traffic strategy.

I’ve done a fair bit of SEO and keyword research before as a few years ago I set up my own dating website (www.phlirtz.com) and spent a lot of time trying to get the site up in the search engine rankings.

So I started off today with this great bit of software called Market Samurai (http://www.marketsamurai.com/). I was originally using it for adwords campaigns, but its good for general keyword research too. For the full version you have to pay, but the keyword research tool works great with the free version.

Basically, you enter a generic keyword phrase, I used ‘Internet Marketing’ and it goes out to find all the keywords it can, using Googles synonym tool. It can also use SEO digger to generate keywords but this is a paid service so you would have to be a member of SEO digger for that option to work.

This generated 103 keywords for me. I then went to google’s keyword tool and used the option to get keyword ideas using a website’s content. Now seeing as I am trying to get keyword idea for my blog, I thought it would be a good idea to see which keywords google thinks are appropriate to the top blogs that Alex showed us in module 4. So I took 2 of the top blogs in that list and plugged them in. Google came back with a load of keywords that it thought these blogs were about.

I plugged these in to Market Samurai as well. The good thing about doing this is that Market Samurai automatically ignores any duplicates. This bumped my keyword list up to 276.

The next step was to use Market Samurai to analyse these keywords. So pressing the ‘Analyse Keywords’ button gives me a few options to choose. I want to know how many people are searching on these terms and how much competition for them is out there. There is also an option for it to estimate how much adwords traffic you should get with them, it’s up to you if you want to check this, if you’re running any paid traffic campaigns it might be worth it. I also checked the SEO Comp option. Usually the only way to gauge the competition for keywords would be to count the search results returned by google for that keyword phrase. Market Samurai uses a different algorithm to gauge the quality of the sites you are competing against as well. For example, if wikipedia.org or amazon.com are ranking highly for certain keywords, then you are unlikely to ever be able to compete with these and Market Samurai takes this in to account.

Once you have all this data, you can then use something called Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) to determine which keywords are going to be worth targeting. KEI is worked out with this formula:

Searches * Searches / Number of Results.

I worked out the KEI using the the SEO Comp number from Market Samurai as the ‘Results’ parameter, which should be a more accurate reading.

This should give you an idea of which keywords people are searching on in this niche, but that don’t have overwhelming competition for them. The higher the KEI the better. Some keywords I would ignore as they are too broad to be worth competing on at the moment. And some will be out of context. But some of the more specific, high KEI keywords will be handy to know for using in blog titles, anchor text for incoming links, headings, phrases to use in your blog posts etc etc.

And if you can’t be bothered to go through all this yourself, you can download the data I came up with here.

I have hardly touched on the surface of Market Samurai but it looks like a very impressive bit of software for creating traffic friendly websites, and it’s still only in beta! I will probably upgrade to the full version when I have time to sit down and make proper use of it.