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The term "keyword" may seem fairly obvious, but in reality its definition in connection with affiliate marketing is not always automatically known by those brand new to the field. When I started, I didn't understand what keywords were (other than that I knew they must be words of some sort!) or what they had to do with anything.
To put it simply, keywords consist of anything a web searcher types into a search engine. We'll talk about why we need to know this in a minute, but first let's look at some examples.
If you were searching for information on dog breeds online, what might you type into Google (or your search engine of choice)? You might put one of these options:
dogs
dog breeds
dog breeding
which dog breed is right for me
Well, each of these is a keyword; in other words, there are 4 keywords above. Notice that a keyword can actually be made up of several words but still be considered "a keyword."
The last one, "which dog breed is right for me," is called a long-tail keyword, obviously because it is quite long—in fact, this one happens to be an entire sentence.
With keywords, word order and plurals make a difference. So "dog" is a different keyword than "dogs," even though they refer to the same thing. "Dog breeds" is a different keyword than "breeds dog" or "breeds of dog."
So why do we care?
Well, in affiliate marketing, how people search the web is of great importance. When they search, you want them to find your site, so you need to know how they are searching in order to best position yourself to be found.
When someone types "dog breeds" into Google, it looks for all the web sites that have the keyword "dog breeds" in them and ranks them in order of relevance and quality using an algorithm that nobody fully understands and is constantly changing.
Therefore, if we know what keywords people are typing into Google, we can incorporate them in our sites. If you build a site about various dog breeds, you'll want to include the keyword "dog breeds" so that you will appear in the pages of results that Google serves up to the searcher. How to get ranked high in the results, like on the first page, is beyond the scope of this particular article. For now you just need to know that in order to be in the list, you have to have the keywords people are using on your site.
People are different (duh, right?)
Obviously, different people will use different terms to look for the same thing. Some tend to type in the main words in a term, and some like to type in a whole sentence, in essence asking the search engine a question like the fourth keyword above. So, if you're following my line of thought, you're already beginning to realize why keywords are important. If you can assemble a nice long list of keywords on your subject, your site can be found no matter what type of person is searching or what keywords they use.
The next question is, then, how can we find out what keywords people are using, other than by simply guessing? You might think guessing is enough, but let me tell you right now, it most assuredly is not. Not if you're serious about affiliate marketing. Successful and smart marketers always do their keyword research before beginning a web site.
They do this by making use of a variety of tools available that track the data they need. We will consider some of these tools in more detail in an upcoming post.
I LOVE my “job.” Affiliate marketing takes work, but it doesn’t feel like work.
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