When it comes to Internet marketing, there is a simple equation you need to understand:

Keywords = money

It’s that simple. The keywords you choose to focus on will determine whether the traffic that reaches your website consists of browsers or buyers. There are many people just looking around online, not particularly interested in making a purchase; but there are also many people who log on with buying in mind. These are the people you want to visit your website, and your carefully targeted keywords will bring them there.

Let’s look at an example of the importance of keywords:

Cindy sells shoes from her seaside cottage. She has sandals, flip-flops, high heels, boots, and more—Cindy stocks a great variety of shoes in a rainbow of styles and designs. She believes shoes are her business.

When Cindy set up a website for her shoe business, she expended a lot of effort in using her past sales records to determine how people found her website. She made lists of keywords her customers may have used to get there, and then meticulously optimized her pages and her advertising campaign with those keywords. Then, Cindy sat back and waited for those sales to start pouring in.

Unfortunately, they didn’t.

What went wrong? Cindy’s research told her how people found her website, but it didn’t tell her what they were searching for, or what specific searches led them to her business. Therefore, a majority of the visitors who found her website through her sales campaign were not looking for shoes sold from a seaside cottage. They may have been simply browsing for footwear. Some of them may have even been looking for brake shoes for their cars, and clicked on Cindy’s link out of curiosity—but since they were looking for a different type of shoe, they didn’t buy anything.

In order to choose the keywords that best suit your Internet business, you need to walk in your customer’s shoes. Try to figure out how someone looking for your specific product or service (or your competitors’ specific product or service) would arrive at a website. In Cindy’s case, instead of optimizing her website for “shoes” or “sandals”, she might have chosen keywords like “beach footwear” or “specialty sandals” or “hand crafted shoes.”

There are several tools available online to help you determine a good starting point for your keyword list (keep in mind, though, that you will have to road-test your keywords to make sure they really bring you results). The keyword generator tool at www.overture.com is a good place to start for generalizations.

If you want more specific keyword assistance, take advantage of the free thirty-day trial at www.nichetracker.com, which will generate not only keywords, but real statistics regarding what people are searching for online. You can use the free time to develop a solid list of keywords, and you may want to sign up for the full service if it proves useful.