I recently delivered a talk to a small group of budding entrepreneurs. The subject was becoming an online business owner. I worked closely with 5 individuals who were looking to make a living from the Internet. They all had varying interests and varying levels of technological experience. The only thing they had in common was a passion to live a better life.

During our small group discussion I hit on several points. However no one single point was stressed more than keywords and search engine ranking. Before you close out on this article give me a few minutes to explain how I am going to shed some light on this topic- light that will help you deliver hot, targeted traffic to your business for free.

This is not generic information. It is not designed to aggravate you or frustrate you. This article is designed to inspire you to think differently about keywords and search engine rankings. Let's start with some basics and move forward from there.

There are two kinds of keywords- the kind that people search for and the kind that people do not search for. A keyword can be defined as a word or phrase that someone would enter in to a search box at Google or Yahoo. It is the search term or query. This keyword is very important for you to know as an online business owner.

You must know this search term for two reasons. 1) You must have a page that is dedicated to that search term. Choosing search terms is rather easy. Just ask yourself what word or term you would use to find your product or service. 2) You must know if it is possible for you to rank well at search engines for that keyword or search term. Determining if you can rank well is very difficult. After all, no one knows the exact algorithms Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine uses to rank websites.

Let's throw in some examples. I have a website dedicated to strength training for women. I can safely assume that "fitness" is a word that people use as their keyword or query at Google. So I have now picked my keyword. Simple enough. However, I need to rank well for that search term. Otherwise what is the point? If no one is going to see my page on fitness then why create a page using the keyword "fitness"?

I can check out my competition by doing a quick search at the major search engines. If I type the word "fitness" (without the quotes) into the Google search box, it returns 799,000,000 search results. Gulp. How can I ever compete for a position in the first 3 pages of Google? The chances of me ranking well for the keyword "fitness" are very, very slim.

The fact of the matter is that most generic terms are going to be difficult to rank well for. You need to narrow your search terms down. You need to get nichier with your terms. You can spend most of your day picking search terms and then checking the competition numbers. This eats a lot of your valuable time. I built my online business by using a hosting company that completely eliminates this tedious process of keyword and search engine ranking data mining.

I simply enter in my site concept and within 20 minutes I have an entire list of related keywords and how much competition there is. Perhaps the biggest plus to having this type of data is that I am now free to build my online business and rank very well for excellent search terms that I would have never thought of. I have an instant blue print of my website and all of its related content.

If you do not have excellent search terms that you can rank well for, you are doomed from the start. No one will ever find your site at the search engines if you do not rank well. That means the only people visiting your site will be friends, family, co-workers and those whom you had to reach by paying additional money for advertising. It's much better to rank well for excellent keywords. This gives you a never-ending stream of hot, targeted leads for free.

My best advice to anyone looking to start a profitable online business is to use the absolute best tools. It makes no sense to spend hours and hours picking search terms and doing half-hearted research. In the end you will lose out on a lot of money and a lot of time. Pick your hosting company wisely and be sure you get the added benefit of the keyword selector and competition analyzer tool as an added bonus for free.

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