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When you choose a niche and set up a website, you want to use every means available to generate profit. Often overlooked, keywords are a major player in the arena of making money.

The concept of using keywords is a simple one. Those are words that identify your website and bring it to the attention of search engines. Without the right keywords, your batting average for getting customers and sales will be pretty dismal.

Broad Keywords vs. long-tail keywords.

Many online entrepreneurs and would be entrepreneurs grasp that keywords are vitally important for traffic, but what they often don’t get is that broad keywords and long tail keywords can be used to bring in the money.

How are these different from just using any keywords? Broad keywords are words that don’t narrow down the topic – think short, one word versus phrases – for example, car versus buying a Honda Odyssey, or tree versus how to plant an Oak tree.

When you look up long tail keywords, you might see that there aren’t as many results for those words as there are for broad keywords. But there are more of those types of phrases, so the actual traffic volume can exceed what you’d get with a broad search ranking.

You want to bring in people who know what they want. Someone who types in the word cars may be looking for the animated cartoon called cars, the history of cars, used cars, new cars, and more.

People type in long tail phrases are telling you what it is they want. For instance, here’s a good one – “How to buy cars without getting ripped off.” You could sell someone a guide on buying a new car because you’d know exactly what their needs are compared to someone just typing in ‘cars.’

If you were in the business of selling self-help products for depression, you could use depression as a broad keyword, but to get more specific you’d use long tail keywords such as ‘post partum depression symptoms’ or ‘signs of depression in men.’

Not only will you pull in people searching for information on depression in general by using broad keywords, but you’ll also get people searching for depression as it pertains to their situation.

When you do a search to find broad keywords, you’ll see that there are a lot of searches per month for that word or words. But the more focused your keywords, the better your site performs when the search engine spiders come crawling. You want the people who find your site to be the ones that are looking for what you have to offer.

If you want to find out much more about keywords and search engine optimization, read Basic Search Engine Optimization Skills Explained in Geek-Free Language! written by expert marketer Jonathan Leger (a free download)

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