Keywords are the words or phrases that people use when they are searching for things on the internet. I have mentioned a Keyword list in some of my articles, but I’m not sure if I emphasized its importance. Every time I discover a new tool for internet marketing, I rediscover how vital a keyword list is to success.

Before you choose a topic for an e book, make a website, write a blog post, write an article, or write an internet ad, you need to make a keywords list. You don’t want to waste time writing about topics that people aren’t searching for. Now, this seemed real obvious to me when we were talking about e books and websites.

However, what I didn’t understand fully was that the search engines treat each page as a separate entity. That means that each article and each blog post are indexed separately. Before you write a blog post or article for your website, you should search keywords to see what keywords and keyword phrases people are searching for. You can use the Google keywords tool or a tool like Traffic Travis to search keywords.

Type in the main word and see what comes up. Don’t put in a phrase because you want the suggested results to guide you, not the other way around. For example, I was going to write a series of articles on how writers’ critique groups can help you write a novel. I knew that this was of interest because it was being talked about in writers’ forums. When I searched keywords for writers’ critique groups, though, there were no hits. No one was searching for that term. So I searched using the keyword writers. There I found “writers groups” and “writers clubs” were getting lots of searches. Guess which keywords I placed on my keyword list?

Also sometimes misspellings can affect your keyword choice. This article uses “e book marketing” as a keyword phrase instead of “ebook marketing”. Many people are searching using the spelling “e book”, so I need to make sure that I use both spellings in my articles, because the search engines treat them as two different keywords.

When you write your blog post or article, you need to use your keyword list. Make sure that you use the main keyword in the title. That keyword should appear 1 or 2 times per hundred words. You need to be careful not to use the word too many times or the search engine won’t like it.

As always, I am dedicated to your ebook success!

Julie Coan