Keyword research is perhaps the single most important task for promoting a website of work from home opportunities. The sooner you catch on to its importance, the more time and money you will save for your home business, and the sooner you will be on the right track to establish your web presence. Here are some practical tips to help you find your bearings when entering this unfamiliar territory.

1. Decide on a keyword phrase

This may sound obvious, but the solution to it is far from being obvious. To keep it simple, the most important thing in this step is that you choose a phrase already being searched by people, not something solely based on your personal preference.

How to find out that a phrase you like is searched? You can use a free trial of a great keyword tool called WordTracker, which will give you a list of keyword phrases relevant to your query with daily search count, a number of competing pages, and your chances of success with them. Use this information to narrow down your choices. Rules of thumb are:

? Look for phrases with daily search count greater than 50

? Competing pages around 1000 (this number is the smaller the better. However, a bigger number is still ok; it just means that there is more competition to beat)

? The highest KEI (success factor) allowed based on the above choices (a good KEI can be over 100. If it is so competitive that it is less than 1, you should probably reconsider your keyword phrase)

If you are lucky enough, you may still have some choices left after the above screening, in which case, further screening rules are:

? Find the phrase that you can best relate to

? Find the phrase that is the most relevant to your home business

? Make sure the phrase is grammatically correct (so that you can market it later)

If you already do not have good enough choices left, then consider using a longer keyword phrase (5-7 words) in your query and keep repeating the whole process above until you arrive at a tentative decision.

2. Test out your tentative keyword on your competition

After you have tentatively decided on a keyword phrase, you still need to check out your competitors to get a sense of the kind of commitment required to catch up, or better, to surpass them. Your competitors are those sites that come up in the top positions when you put in your search term, which is your tentative keyword phrase, in the search engine.

There are three things to check on the competitor sites:

i. Number of back links

The purpose of checking the backlinks is to get an idea of how many backlinks you need build to your own web site in order to surpass your competitor's position in the search result. If there are tens of thousands of backlinks, perhaps it's not easy to catch up any time soon with normal effort, although still attainable with an aggressive effort. Too many backlinks found on the competitor may suggest another choice of keyword phrase (go back to Step1).

Use free tool www.linkpopularity.com to check backlinks with MSN, Yahoo, and Google.

ii. If the site is optimized with the keyword phrase

The purpose of this exercise is to see if it is easy to beat your competitor. There are sites that are not necessarily optimized 100% for the search engines. If so, when you optimize yours, you get a big chance of beating them. If your competition has already optimized their sites, then they may not readily beaten and perhaps, choosing another keyword phrase would be a sensible thing to do (go back to Step 1).

Sites that are optimized with the keyword phrase usually include it in the following html tags: title, description, metatag, H1, body, alt links for images, etc.

Use view source code menu option in Internet Explorer to view the html code of any web page.

iii. Keyword density

This is to get a sense of the type of keyword density that would rank the top with the search engine. If your top competition has its keywords at 2%, then you should match, but not to significantly exceed this percentage to avoid overdoing it.

Use free tool at www.seochat.com to check keyword density of any website.

3.Optimize your own web site with your chosen keyword

If the Steps 1 and 2 have indicated that your tentative keyword phrase has a decent chance of success, then putting your keyword in your web page is the next thing to do. Put it in all the html tags such as title, description, metatag, H1, body, alt links for images, also listed under ii of Step 2 above. Then you are all set to go.

To sum up, keyword research is extremely important to building web presence. Without it, your simple work from home opportunity may be too simple to see any success. With proper keyword research as explained above, your home business web site will be on its way to get highly targeted organic search engine traffic. Your established keyword choice will also anchor your future marketing effort so that your whole home business venture becomes an effective, coherent endeavor with no time wasted.

Copyright by Ying Hong 2008