One important thing to learn if you’re going to earn online cash is how to do targeted keyword research.

For example, did you know that you could get over half of the total searches for a keyword term like “earn cash online for free” and only get about 20-30 visitors in a month? The first rule of targeted keyword research is to understand the total demand for a particular keyword. If the keyword in question doesn’t generate enough traffic then you’ll never get enough organic search traffic to your site. Tools like Google’s free Adwords Tool or Keyword Elite can help you determine this number.

Next, you need to understand the number of sites that you’re competing against. For example, a keyword like ‘fishing’ may have millions of results and very tough, long established, competition. However, a more narrow term, like ‘Alaska fishing trips’ has about 500,000 competing pages and it can be narrowed down even further.

You have to consider the ratio between the number of competing pages and the number of searches per month. Too much competition may mean that you won’t be able to get anywhere near the top while low competition with no traffic means you can get to #1 easily but you’ll only have a small trickle of traffic from Google. What you want to do is find the happy medium between the two. You want easy to beat competition with sufficient search traffic to make the keyword term profitable.

Speaking of profitable, of earning cash online, your keyword must be what is known as a buying keyword. Is the term one that people search when they’re in the mood to buy something or is it one they might use when looking for information. For example, which is the buying keyword, “World Fishing Records” or “Discount Fishing Lodges”?

It used to be common to for people who were trying to earn online cash to optimize for bad grammar and misspellings. This isn’t as effective today because Google’s algorithms take this into account either through auto-correcting or simply not ranking offending sites as well as more grammatically correct sites.

Don’t try to earn cash by presenting sub-standard content.  You need to consider if you have enough interest in the subject at hand to write articles about the topic. Can you deliver what the searcher is looking for? If not, you may want to find another keyword that you can use to earn online cash.

Frank Carr November 22nd, 2008 Features

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