Scott Henderson Internet Marketing - How to start an Internet Business

One of the most important elements in how to start an internet business is keyword research.  That’s right, even before you select your niche or your domain name, you should conduct this task to increase your chances of online success.  One word in your domain name can mean the difference between success and failure.

What are keywords?  Keywords are the term used for the words that are typed into search engines to locate web sites or information.  For example if you are hungry and are looking online for something to cook, you may type into a search engine “recipes”.  “Recipes” in this example is the keyword.

Keywords can also be phrases.  For example if you are looking for a spaghetti recipe you would most likely type into the search engine “spaghetti recipe”.  The more defined your keyword is, the more defined the search result will be.  This is an obvious but important fact about establishing your marketing campaign.

Continuing with the recipe niche, if you centered your whole campaign around the keyword “recipes” you are going to face extremely tough competition.   What you need to do is to seek out some keyword phrases where the competition is much less while still being searched for by people in the search engines.

How do you do this?  There are several tools available to assist you, some are even free.  You simply start off by entering a root keyword into the tool and analyze the results.  The tools will give you the number of times the words are searched for and the amount of competition you will encounter.  Ideally you are looking for a somewhat modest search count with a low competition count.

Using free tools from Google, the Keyword Tool, and Google Search, you can come up with some solid research.  For example when entering “recipes” into the Keyword Tool, it will report that over 55 million monthly searches are conducted on average worldwide.  To see the amount of competition enter “recipes” into Google search and note the results number in the upper right, over 98 million. That means you would be going up against roughly 98 million other website pages if you were to center your campaign around this keyword. That would not be a good move.

Going back to the Keyword Tool, you will also be given a whole list of keyword phrases that will have the word “recipe” in them.  This is where you can strike gold.   Scanning the list I find a 4 word phrase that gets nearly 50,000 searches per month “taste of home recipes”, and better yet when I enter the phrase into the search engine there are only 52 competing sites!  This is a very good keyword to use to center a marketing campaign around.

One thing to point out here about using the search engine to get the number of competing pages is to look at the last page of results listed in the page counter located at the bottom of the first page.  In this example the last page is 6, and by going to page 6 you will see that there are just 52 results, not 2 million as listed on page 1.

The next step is to look at domain name availability for the exact same keyword phrase.  Ideally you want .com, but, .net and .org will work just as well.  If none are available then consider adding a word to the end of the phrase such as “tasteofhomerecipesonline” followed by the .com.

By understanding these simple tasks you will know one of the key processes used in how to start an online business the smart way.  It is all about having your website be listed on the first page of results of a search.  The less the competition, the easier.

Scott Henderson
Internet Marketing Consultant/Coach