Google Keywords Tool Guide

If you have thought about starting your own website or already have one, and have done any research at all, you have read about the importance of keywords. Everything on the web is driven by keywords. It’s the fuel the Internet runs on.

One of the ways to get great traffic to your website is through the Google Adwords program. You select the keywords you want to bid on and set up the budget you want to use to get traffic based on those keywords from websites that utilize the Google Adsense program and other sources.

There is a tool to help you choose the best keywords to bid on that you definitely need to know about. I just learned about it from a friend, so we are going to learn how to use it together. Open a new browser window and copy and paste this address into your address bar.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

If you are not sure about all of the terms used in association with keywords and Google’s Adwords program, click that very first link that says, “keywords for your ad campaigns”. You can use that as a guide if we get into unfamiliar territory.

In that first paragraph is a link titled, “Learn More”, that gives a more detailed explanation about using the Google Keywords Tool. In this article, I am going to try to give you the information in layman’s terms to make it easier to understand.

As with anything, you should also at some point read the terms of service. It is always a good idea to read the terms of service for any program you are about to use. But we will skip that step for now.

We all think we know which keywords we want to and are targeting with our website. I just had a humbling experience. I have been at this for a long time and have a lot of experience in optimizing websites for keyword content. However, I just clicked the tab at the Google Keyword Tool that says, “Site-Related Keywords “, to extract keywords from one of my own websites and can see that it is not optimized for the keyword I would have chosen.

You may want to do this first. Put in your URL and let it pull out the keywords it finds to be most relevant to your website. You might be as surprised as I was. Now I am going to be re-writing some of the text content at my website before I bid on any Google Adwords. Without the Google Keyword Tool, I would have likely just wasted money.

Make sure your website is optimized for the keywords that you wish to target by analyzing it with the Google Keyword Tool before bidding on your Google Adwords.

Now, using the other tab, “Keyword Variations”, you can type in one keyword phrase or keyword per line and it will give you suggestions as to other keywords and phrases you can bid on that are related to your topic. (I like to type in one keyword or phrase at a time)

The suggestions the Google keyword Tool creates for you are based on statistical data Google compiles from the numerous searches that occur daily through their search engine, so those keywords and phrases are more likely to produce targeted traffic to your website.

As you type in each keyword or phrase and check the results the Google Keyword Tool gives you, look over to the right. You can add the keywords and phrases you might like to bid on. Create your list as you go. You can always edit it down to a few later on.

Once you have your list of keywords and phrases you might want to bid on, you can login to your Google Adwords account and check to see how much it will cost you for each of them. Then you can decide how to spend your budget wisely. Nothing replaces good research. The Google Keyword Tool takes a lot of the guesswork out of buying Google Adwords and I applaud them for creating this great tool.

Now, what they do not say anywhere at the Google Keyword Tool website, is that you can use this tool to analyze your competitor’s websites as well. Go to Google and type in your targeted keyword or phrase. Copy the URL of the top 10 results. Analyze each of them using the “Site Related Keywords” tab at the Google Keywords Tool.

By doing this, you will see what keywords and phrases their websites are optimized for. If you want to compete with them, you need to optimize your website in a similar way and you may want to start bidding on keywords and phrases that match those that were pulled from competing websites.

Follow success and it will follow you. Do what successful people are doing and you are likely to also achieve success. The Google Keyword Tool can help you do that.

Adsense – Still A Cash Cow?

With the advent of Google losing a court case (and a shed load of money) and the continued problem of click fraud the question is now on the tip of everyone’s tongue – “Is Google Adsense still the cash cow that it was?”.

In this article I’ll take a look at ways in which the average webmaster may still develop a successful Adsense business and how to use the up and coming Google witch hunt to your advantage.

There are currently two main problems that are facing Google, both of which are serious and could lead to the demise of both Adsense and Adwords.

The first and most serious problem is that of click fraud. For those of you who do not know click fraud is the act of clicking on your own (or a friends) ads in an attempt to generate artificial earnings.

This is such a problem for Google as it ensures that the value that Adwords purchasers gets is significantly less then they would want, thus ensuring that sooner or later they will just get up and walk away (with what remains of their advertising budget firmly clamped in their hand).

To remedy this problem Google have tried putting several rules in place such as not allowing the webmaster to show Adsense ads in auto surf sites (to name but one restriction).

The second problem that Google faces relates to content, notably the amount of original content which is out there.

The problem in this case is that many people have purchased article scraper software (software that you point at someone elses website and just shout ‘Fetch!’ – it then returns a document collection which is a complete rip off of the site).

This was already a problem before the advent of Adsense sites and with the continual chain of people chasing high value keywords it has become worse; It is now possible to search for a given phrase on Google and return nothing but duplicate content for the first few pages of search engine results.

In order to address this problem Google has been modifying it’s algorithm to effectively punish people with duplicate content, the extent to which an individual site is ‘penalized’ is currently a matter for debate.

So, given Google is about to launch a witch hunt looking for sites with nothing but duplicate content and for people performing click fraud what can you do?

After all there are so many people out there using site generation tools that Google can trace and/or document obfustication technology (you’ve seen the ads – “We can make your one original article into 300 and Google will never know!” – yep, and anyone who visits your site will just find drivel with spelling errors or contextual mistakes).

Step 1.
If you must use site generation software make sure you find one that leaves no trace behind itself, ask yourself – ‘If I was looking at the source code from the generated page how would I know that it’s machine generated?’

Step 2.
Don’t use site scraping tools, they're immoral and a waste of your time

Step 3.
Do include RSS feeds into your pages, they add fresh content with no effort on your part (at least one of the site generation tools now supports this kind of functionality)

Step 4.
Don’t click on your own adverts, Google will can you in the blink of an eye

Step 5.
Do get incoming links from established sites (in the same area as your niche content)

Summary.
If you are at all serious about creating an Adsense income you need more than one site and so it is inevitable that you will use site generation tools (because there aren’t enough hours in the day for you to create the amount of pages by hand), by all means use these tools but use them ethically.

When using site generation tools ensure that they allow you to add multiple blocks of Adsense /Clickbank /Ebay code to each page (it saves you a lot of time) and that it performs search engine optimization for you (both on page and off page).

You should also take the time to write some of your own original content – like this or perhaps pay a ghost writer to create a batch of articles for you (don’t forget to ad your bio box at the bottom of everything you write).

To answer the initial question, yes, it is still possible to make LOTS of money from Google – you just need to be careful.