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The absolute basic component you must learn and understand, if you want to make any money on the Internet, is that you have to find and use keywords that will help get your site on Google’s radar.

But not everyone knows how to find good keywords and some of us may not even know what a keyword is in the first place.

A keyword is what you and I and everyone else in the world types into search engines to find out information. And a keyword phrase of 3 or more words is known as a longtail keyword (more about that in a later post).

So, let’s take our dachshund topic as an example.

Let’s say you love dachshunds and want to buy a dachshund salt and pepper shaker set. What would you type into the search box? I am sure you would not just put in “salt and pepper shakers” and sift through thousands of sites that sell those. No, you would put in “dachshund salt and pepper shakers”. This would bring up a list of sites that sell exactly what you are looking for. These, my friend, are keywords. And you must use keywords in each and every piece of content, article, blog post, etc that you put on the Internet if you want an increased chance at making any money.

But this could bring up way too many pages and you may not be sure if you can compete with them…at least not yet. And how do you know if anyone even uses that “keyword” when searching?

A free and easy way to see how many searches are done each month for a given keyword term/phrase is to use the Google keyword tool. You can simply put keywords in a Google search and you can find the Google keyword tool. This is one free way how to find good keywords.

Once you are on the Google keyword site, type in your keyword(s) and the captcha code and hit enter. This will come up with a long list of related keywords that you may not have even thought about but may be good keywords for your website. Now, I will be the first one to tell you that the Google keyword tool is not 100% accurate. Actually I do not think that any tool, paid or free, is 100% accurate, but it will give you a good estimate and a great place to start to find good keywords. You can also use the choose columns to display and hit who all if you want to see everything including monthly trends for the search.

Once you have your list of keywords, I recommend that you go to Google and start putting them in one by one. See what comes up when you do this. Look for any free sites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, or Blogger. And you can also look for any articles sites such as Ezinearticles, Article Alley, or Article Base (there are many more article directories). If you see some of those free sites plus your keyword that gets a fair amount of searches, then you may want to use that keyword on your site.

Caution: Do not only go for the keywords that have a bunch of searches each month. Even if it just has 100 searches a month, if you are able to make a $20 sale on a quarter of those, you have a chance at making $500 per month off of one site. And if you do this multiple times you can make more money.

Being able to find good keywords for your first website takes time and is a step that many newbies in Internet Marketing neglect to do. This causes them to fail and give up. But if you do it right or at least try to do it right, you may find yourself getting a sale or two, which will in turn help motivate you to do more. Each time you do keyword research, it will get a little easier. But it is always going to be somewhat time consuming and tedious, though a necessity.

Next: Setting Up a Free Website