The internet is driven by keywords. Every time a person searches for something on the internet, they use keywords to narrow their search. And that's not even exclusive to search engines. Regardless where on the internet you are, keywords form the foundation of the websites you visit and the information you find.

As an online entrepreneur, the keywords you target can spell the difference between success and failure. Particularly in the evolving world of pay-per-click advertising, the keywords you choose can increase your costs ten fold without you even realizing it. This article will take you through a process for selecting effective keyword phrases while minimizing the competition you'll encounter along the way.

The first place you should look is your competition. Visit the websites of your competition, right click and view the source code for their site. Right at the top, you'll see the meta tags including the keywords they've chosen for their own website. Make note of the ones you think would work well for your own business as well.

Take those keywords and enter them into the publicly-accessible keyword tool on the Google Adwords platform. This tool will bring up a long list of related keyword phrases and display the search volume compared with the competition for those phrases inside the Adwords platform. Even if you have no intention of using the Adwords program, this competition reading is a valuable indicator of the competition in general for those phrases.

This exercise will open your eyes to all the other keyword phrases you could use that you might not have thought of earlier. The idea is to find a phrase that has respectable search volume while having little competition. That will give you the shortest path to success in terms of search engine optimization.

Once you have selected a list of phrases you might be interested in, enter each one into a standard Google search, along with quotation marks. Make note of the number of listings that come up for each phrase. This is another gauge of the organic competition you'll be facing. You'll quickly notice that some phrases bring up far fewer listings than others. Those are the ones you want.

The last step involves entering the phrases you selected into the publicly-accessible WordTracker keyword tool. This tool estimates the total daily search volume for each phrase. Although the Google platform attempts to give this information as well, it's presented as a bar chart and you'll quickly notice that some of the phrases have far higher daily search volume than others.

The idea is to pick a series of keyword phrases that have limited competition but sizable search volume. Once identified, you can position your website around those phrases and have a quick assent in the Google page ranking system for those phrases. In my own experience, I managed to get my new website onto the first page of a Google search within just 17 days!