In the olden days we had persons of adventure venturing into the wild West seeking their fortunes in the gold mines of Colorado and elsewhere. Today everyone is venturing into the vast unknown of the world wide web seeking their fortunes via Keywords. But like the miners of old you have to know how and where to find these golden keyword nuggets.

Everyone thinks they must optimize their sites for the most searched for words. This is so untrue and has resulted in many disappointed entrepreneurs. The key to making money from your websites whether it be via PPC or SEO is in choosing keywords that are not in high competition but yet still attract a fair number of searches. Forget the one word and two word keywords. You may still be lucky to find some three word gems but the real action is to be found in keywords of 4 or more words.

If you are doing PPC then the one and two word phrases will be too expensive to compete on if your budget is small. And let's face it 95% of the persons trying make a living online are living on very tight budgets. If you are doing search engine optimization then you must optimize for the longer phrases. If you try for the very competitive ones first it may take you months, even years to get high rankings at all.

High rankings on Google require a tremendous amount of backlinks for the highly competitive terms and on a small budget this takes a long time. The smart thing to do is optimize for the 3 words and longer phrases and be sure to use these phrases in your title tags. Some people argue that Google is not the only search engine and so backlinks should not be that important but with 70% of the search market I would say Google comes pretty close to being the only search engine.

Furthermore, studies have shown that the #1 ranking gets 70% of the clicks, the #2 ranking gets 20% and the #3 gets 10% with the next 7 positions in to the top 10 sharing the balance. So where do you want to be? #1 of course. But to achieve this for a highly competitive keyword involves a tremendous amount of link building and money. However it is not very difficult to get top 10 positions on Google when you optimize for 4, 5 and 6 word phrases.

Where do you find these words? The most popular and respected tool is wordtracker which is a paid service. There are some free keyword research tools available with which you can start with but eventually if you are serious about making money online you will need to make use of wordtracker. Another commonly asked question is what is considered a "reasonable number of searches". Well one rule of thumb I use and which has worked pretty well over the years is the 30 or more per day phrase. If you find 100 such phrases this will give you 3000 unique searches per day. If you have a #1 ranking on Google you get 70% of the clicks, that's 2100. If 10% click on your product or adsense ads that represents 210 clicks per day that can bring you money. That is not something to balk at.

Bottom line is if you want traffic to your website via the two major methods, PPC and SEO, then you need to mine for 3 and longer word keywords. Eventually as you get ranked for these secondary phrases and as you build page rank and trust rank with Google you will find Google will release some love your way with respect to the primary keywords. And when that happens my friend you are sailing!