Sunday, November 2, 2008

How to select good keywords

By Brian Basch

Good keywords can be compared to a good tagline. They are both equally important for the success of your advertising campaign. Your keywords are in effect the base of your PPC advertising campaign. If you choose weak keywords they will cause your campaign to fail, however strong ones can make your campaign soar.

In order to make a good keyword list you will need to make sure you do your research. Drill down and look into every likely keyword carefully. You can then choose the very best keywords for your campaign.

Here is an example to clarify the concept of keywords. "Real Estate" can be used as the base keyword.

"Real Estate" is a highly competitive keyword due to high commissions.

Your initial step will be to compile a list. Think of the many keywords your potential customers might use, when they think about the base keyword. Take our example "Real Estate," searchers can use alternatives such as; investment property, real property etc. These keywords are just the tip of the iceberg as they are quite similar to the base word. This means that you should search a little more.

After this you will dig down into the different specialty markets of real estate. For example; commercial real estate and boarding houses etc. Then you will mix these sets of keywords and generate new ones.

You can also create an ad group that will focus entirely on real estate company names. You can also add a .com to the name or your own country extension. It would not matter if such a domain does not exist, sometimes people type similar things into the search engine giving you an opportunity to get your product some low cost clients.

Try not to use general keywords; a better idea is to use keywords that specifically target your own niche market. Put yourself in your potential buyer's shoes to discover the keywords that they use.

Here are some points to note:

- .com, .net etc. can be added to your keyword.

- Company names, domain names, and variations may turn out to be effective.

- Enhancing keywords with words like; best and cheap can be added to your keywords.

- Find keywords from your web log files. Use keywords that your visitors have used to find your website.

- Your competitors sales copy is worth checking out.

Make sure to separate all these keywords into different lists. Place all the typos in one ad group, the plurals in another and similarly go on with the rest. This will lead to easy targeting of your ad.

Using the points in this article you can build formidable lists of keywords. With these strong keywords you can build winning campaigns, and nothing will stand in the way of your success. Wishing you prosperity! - 15465

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