High-Paying Keywords, Part 4 (series)
Alright, since I doubt anyone's going to offer to fly me to France to attend a book signing of the French edition of Make Easy Money with Google, time to get back on track with our discussion of high-paying keywords. In Part 1, we discussed the kinds of high-paying keyword lists. In Part 2, we discussed how keyword lists are created. And in Part 3, we discussed the problems with high-paying keyword lists. Today, we turn our attention to judging keyword population and competition.
Keyword Popularity
You can measure keyword popularity in two ways. One way is to measure how often a keyword is searched for. Another way is to measure how often a keyword is used in web pages. The two measures are very different, but you're interested in both. Just to prevent confusion, we'll refer to the first one as “search popularity” and the second as “competition popularity”.
Many people are interested in search popularity. Google publishes a weekly list of the top-gaining search queries that it calls the Zeitgeist. Journalists and students of human behavior like to look at these lists to figure out what the population at large is interested in, and to ferret out any trends. But note that Google's list is not the “top searches”, it's the “top gaining” queries, and it undergoes some human filtering. You won't find any pornography in that list, for example. Other search engines provide similar lists.
The truth is, only the search engines themselves know what people are really looking for, and they keep that information to themselves for the most part. Or they'll sell it to you, perhaps. This is why “meta search engines” were developed. They're like a layer on top of the regular search engines. Users enter their queries into the meta search engine and it turns around and asks one or more search engines to find the results, does some magic to the results (perhaps mixing in ads, for example, or rearranging the order of the results to suit their own needs) and logs the information about what was searched for. Get a large enough user base and you can start to develop some mathematical models about what people are really searching for, and to determine search popularity based on that information.
Competition popularity is much easier to determine, because the search engines give you that information for free. Do a search on Google, for example, and you'll see a message similar to “Results 1-10 of about 895,000″, so you know there are about 895,000 pages with that keyword in Google's index. The numbers are approximate, but good enough for assessing competition.
High Search Popularity + Low Competition = Money
If you're looking strictly to make money from high-paying keywords, your job is to find those keywords that have higher search popularity but lower competition popularity. You and everyone else are doing this, of course, and it's not easy. Tools like NicheBot can be useful, but don't forget Google's own Keyword Tool, available free-of-charge to AdWords customers.
You may be wondering at this point how useful high-paying keyword lists really are. Let's leave that discussion for next time.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.
 |
Enjoyed this post? Get free updates by mail or by RSS! |
Socialize This Post (Please!)
Tags
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it! Simply copy and paste the code below to your website. The link will look like this: High-Paying Keywords, Part 4 (series)
Comments
One Response to “High-Paying Keywords, Part 4 (series)”
[…] Understanding keyword popularity […]