How People Find You

Suppose someone wants to find your site? There are three main ways it can happen:

• Advertisements. Someone may see or hear your web address or "URL" in an advertisement and come to your site.
• Links. Another source may mention you so that its visitors learn about you.
• Search engines. A user may type keywords into a search engine and find you. (A "keyword" is a word or phrase people use to search for a web site.)

The most likely way people will find you depends on your web site but the best way, from your point of view, is search engine traffic. That's because people had a problem when they typed in the keyword that led them to your site. They're ready to get a solution and you have (or will have) one for sale.

If you want people to come to your site through search engines, you need keywords that people type in frequently. It's time to see how often people use keywords related to your niche and whether they're likely to generate income for you.

This 20 minute task consists of several small tasks. For the most successful outcome, you'll want to follow the steps in the order listed.

Your 20 Minute Task

1. Start by writing 5 words or phrases that you or someone else might use to search for your site at your favorite search engine. For example, if you were searching for a site to find the perfect mate, you might use one of these "keywords": dating, singles, match making, perfect mate, lonely hearts. Now, write five words for your site.
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2. Next, go to Google's keyword search site at adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
   • In the box that says "Enter one keyword or phrase per line: " type in the five keywords, one per line.
   • In the box that says "Type the characters you see in the picture below," type in the characters. This technique is called "Captcha." It's purpose is to make it hard for spammers and robots to use the system.
   • Click the "Get keyword ideas" button.
3. Google will return a list of words that people use to search for your topic. Look through them to get an idea of what words and topics people use to find sites related to yours.
4. Now, look at the advertisers. Google probably showed you the keywords you typed in at the top of the listing. Are there advertisers for your keywords? That is, are the boxes shaded? Next, click on the column title that reads "Advertiser Competition" to have Google sort the listing by how much advertisers are competing for those keywords. Is there plenty of competition? If not, it will be harder to make money.
5. Click the "Approx Avg Search Volume" title. Look at how many searches are made for each keyword or phrase in an average month. If you have a truckload of money to invest in your site, you might want one of the keywords that has hundreds of thousands or millions of searches. There is almost certainly some major competition for those searches and it will be very hard to create a new site that will earn a position on the first page or two of a search engine's listings for the keyword. Instead, you should look for searches that get somewhere closer to 10,000 - 50,000 searches a month. Then you know that you've narrowed your target to something that will likely be both profitable.
6. Just above the listing of keywords you'll find a drop-down box with instructions to "Choose columns to display." Click on the box and select "Show All."
7. Under the "Estimated Avg. CPC" column, you'll see about how much it costs to advertise on Google for each keyword, assuming you want to be in one of the top positions. If you decide, in a later 20 minute task, to put Google Adwords on your site as a way of getting a little money, you can expect to get a portion of the amount shown. How big your portion will be is complicated or even impossible for anyone but Google to determine. It's not very large but it can add up if many people come to your site and click on Google Ads.
8. Look at the graphs for your keywords under the "Search Volume Trends" title. It will show you how seasonal your topic is. For example, you may expect a topic such as "Healthful Recipes" to be relevant year around but "Christmas Storybook" would likely only have searches during the last three months of the year. Next to the graph is the "Highest Volume Occurred In" column which tells you the month with the highest number of searches.
9. Print the list. You'll use it for later 20 minute tasks.
10. Finally, go to Google.com. In the search box, type in your best keyword or phrase and search for it. (If you type in a phrase, put quotation marks around it, as in "search phrase".) For best results, use a search phrase with less than 100,000 monthly searches from the list you just printed.
11. Below the search box on the results page you'll see something like "Results 1-10 of about..." and some number. If the number is huge, say above ten million, you probably have too many competitors.
12. Check the ten results that came up on the first page. Pay particular attention to the last five. Can you make a better web site than any of these? You don't have to do it all at once. But you need to eventually in order to get yourself into the top ten Google search results for your keyword.