Keyword Selection Process

The keyword selection process will allow you to pick keywords that are both high in value and high in demand. The reason is that you may get the highest paying AdSense keywords in the world, but if there aren't enough people to access your page and click on your advertisements; you will NOT make much money at all.

Here is a word of warning before you read this section, especially if you believe yourself to be the expert in this field. The stuff I am going to put forth may look like something you have read or used in the past, but it is totally different.

For one thing, this isn't a system that will enslave you to spend all of your time working. Besides, everyone is talking about seo. For those who think this is redundant, how many of you have actually applied the techniques of the book and still don't see your site coming up in the front page of the major search engines.

Now, let's begin.

Let's assume that you are going to write an article on how to consolidate student loans. After you have laid out what you are going to write about, you open the "Black Hat AdSense Keyword Database," or your favorite listing of top paying keywords, and look for terms related to your topic.

While browsing through the database, you notice that the keywords related to student loan consolidation are way on the top of the chart. On August 13, 2006, the cost per click for "school loan consolidation" is $69.16 and college loan consolidation is $68.35. Wow! You move down the list and select a few more keywords that are not as expensive for the advertisers. (Please note that you can also use the techniques in the how to find high paying keyword with NO budget section.)

If you are an expert in search engine optimization (SEO) or keyword analysis, you can use a program such as Wordtracker to analyze the keywords that will give you the best position. However, if you don't have access to such programs, here is a simple and easy way that I call the "Black Hat Keyword Selection Process"

1. Create a spreadsheet with the following columns: Keyword, Cost per click, Overture, Estimated Demand, Number of Competition, DC Ratio

2. Put all the keywords you have chosen from the Black Hat AdSense database under the column labeled "Keyword"

3. Put down the cost per click from the Black Hat AdSense
Database under the "Cost Per Click" column

4. Go to Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) to find out how many

times the keyword has been searched in last month and put in under the column "Overture." (Hint: you don't need to search one by one; you can type in a generic search such as "loan consolidation" in our case.)

5. Under the "Estimated Demand" column, multiply the result from the "Overture" column by 8. (Hint: A rule of thumb is that you can get the number of searches in
Google by multiplying the Yahoo Overture result by 8)

(Note: In our example, the student loan consolidation program keyword has approximately 20,700,000 pages indexed by Google.com.)

6. Go to Google.com and search for each of the keywords, and put in under the column "Number of Competition."

7. Now, on the last column, divide the results of the "Estimated Demand" column by the "Number of Competition" column to get a Demand/Competition ratio (or simply DC Ratio).

The Demand/Competition ratio (DC Ratio) is a simple way to tell if the keyword will be profitable.

A high DC Ratio simply means the number of people searched the keyword is high (demand) and the number of web pages on the internet with the similar content is low (competition).

However, DC ratio is not the only criteria to pick a keyword; you have to use common sense on what the ACTUAL amount of estimated demand is. If the estimated demand for the keyword is low, there won't be too many people going to visit your website; even you are on the first page of search results in Google.

Hence, you would want a keyword with a high DC ratio with a high number of estimated demands.

For the purpose of our case, you have decided to use "school loan consolidation."