IM101 Step 6: Tuning Your Affiliate Product Keywords

Finding the best keywords for your affiliate site is not too difficult but essential to learn how to make money online. The key is finding the right terms that will have the highest density on your page with hopefully the additional benefit of a low competition in the search engines. This also works for your own product or informational sites as well.

Since I had picked a dieting product this is not as easy as something with a smaller niche such as a hobby or an aspect of a professional skill. The basic strategy for a high competition keyword subject area is to narrow it down to smaller segments by using longer keyword phrases. From my last article using the keyword tools provided can give me a very good indication of what keyword phrase is going to a) have less competition, b) ranked faster and c) visible in the first ten results of a Google search. It is important to try and analyze this before you kick into gear building your sites.

For example, the word 'diet' alone has a Google page return of 163 millions results - that is, 163 million references to external web sites. Getting to the top ten results in Google for just the word 'diet' would be a very, very tough task.

You may have noticed that I waited some time before continuing this article to work on my own articles and my ebook. But, I was also waiting for my affiliate sample site to start gaining rank in Google. Part of this plan was to focus on my core keyword phrases within the affiliate site's content.

For my example I knew that a couple of key phrases had to be part of my solution. Since I was focusing on a diet guide I had to use both the guide's title and author as keyword phrases. This is an important step for the future since I knew the guide was going to gain in popularity over time. In this case - 'The Diet Solution Program' and 'Isabel De Los Rios'. It is key to use these for future keyword phrase searches as the product gains popularity.

But, I also wanted to find a keyword phrase that has a more general health and diet search with a smaller Google result. After a couple of hours on the tools using the words 'diet', 'dieting', 'health', 'nutrition', 'diet plan', 'healthy diet' I finally hit the phrase I wanted - 'healthy diet plan' which I found to have a decent set of results in search but low enough to get ranked quickly. (Remember, to use these tools just type in the core one or two word phrases and see what results come back. Then, go to Google and see how many results come back from your phrases. The lower the number of results the easier it is for you to get ranked in the top ten.)

I typically look for keyword phrase results in Google with near one million results. Here's an example that is close:







If you focus on key phrases with results under 100,000 but greater than about 25,000 then you can get ranked very quickly in Google. The downside is that the daily search volume for your phrase may be too low so this would only generate 10-20 hits a day.

I was able to get a keyword site ranked in the top ten of Google for a result of over 25 million in the search return. However this took about six months and a lot of work. Be sure you pick one keyword phrase that has about one million results - but, don't focus on it first. Let it become a natural part of your site as you build it.

So, now I'm ready to start building a site. I'm now armed with my keyword phrases 'The Diet Solution Program', 'Isabel De Los Rios', 'healthy diet plan' and 'natural weight loss'. Enter these into Google as full search phrase enclosed in both quotes and not enclosed and you'll be able to see for yourself how many results are returned for each.

Next up, using Blogger as a simple, free way to build your site.