Starting your own internet business is far more than designing and creating a website to sell your products and/or services. Before you do anything you need to find out if people are buying your products online and more importantly how they will find your website to buy your products. Just having a website is only part of the story of making money online.

It is equally importantly that you know what your competition is selling. Is it possible for you to be able to successfully compete with them and maybe even do better than them? In the offline world it quite easy to work this out as all you have to do is watch your competition but this is not possible in the online world. Then again maybe it is by doing some research into online activity. You have to find out how people are finding the websites of your competition by being able to access what they are searching for online.

People usually use the internet to search for information to answer questions about their problems and/or desires. It is not uncommon for people to turn to the internet for answers when they have not been able to find the answers elsewhere. So what you have is people who are desperate for information and answers about their most pressing problems. They want them solved so are more than willing to pay for a solution.

So how do these people go about finding the answer to their questions online?

These days lots of internet users rely upon the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to help them search for solutions. However there are virtually hundreds of these search engines available for people to use but the top ones generate the majority of the traffic. It is therefore a good idea to concentrate on these top search engines to find out what people are searching for in regard to your products and/or services.

What are Keywords?

When a person uses a search engine they type in a word or more likely a phrase about their problem or what topic they want information about. These are keywords or keyword phrases. These words or phrases (keywords) are what you need to know so that you can design your website to target these thereby capturing some of this search engine traffic. The more targeted your website is to what people are searching for the more likely you are to generate sales.

How do search engines and keywords work?

A person might want to improve their golf swing so they type the phrase "improve golf swing" into a Google search. The search results page will show two types of results, paid and organic results. Try it by typing in "improve golf swing" in a Google search.

At the top of your page you will see sponsored links and also have a narrow column down the right hard side with more sponsored links. These are paid results where merchants have paid Google to list these results on search result pages for their keyword "improve golf swing". The rest of the results will be organic results or search results that Google has determined are the most naturally related to the phrase "improve golf swing". The phrase "improve golf swing" is often referred to as a "keyword term". You will also see that Google highlights the phase "improve golf swing" throughout the results.

As you can see if you can do some research and find these keyword terms that people search for in relation to your products then you be able to build your website to maximise your business opportunities from search engine traffic. This means Google will determine your website to be naturally related to certain keyword terms you have optimised your website for and thus list you in their organic search results. The closer you can get to the top of the search engine results for your keyword terms the more traffic you will get to your website.

Also after you identify the keywords that are applicable to your products and/or services you can also launch a paid advertising campaign and have your website listed in the paid results as well as the organic results thereby dominating the search results for those keywords. However one must be aware of the level of competition for some keywords and not pay too much for them as it is very easy, especially for new advertisers, to end up spending more money than they get back in product sales.

New website owners may want to wait until they have a more established website with results in the organic search listings before attempting paid advertising because they will then know that their keywords work. Just do keyword research and optimise your website for them until you see that they are working for you.