A guide to finding good key words and phrases.

Choosing the appropriate keyword in your marketing promotions is an essential component of building and promoting your affiliate marketing business. One thing to realize when using the Google Adwords Tool your keyword research guide is that the results are a little biased. The tool itself was created to use when developing adwords campaigns, therefore results would favor key phrases Google would prefer and perhaps leave out some better ones.

When using the tool as a keyword research guide there are a few options you can use to get better results. First thing to do is create a Google Adwords Account. Sign-up is free and this will allow you to log into your adwords account and customize the adwords tool a little.

Once logged in you will obviously see where to insert your keywords for suggestions. Look to the right side of the page for a drop down menu called, "columns." I always like the add the "approximate CPC (search)" option to the page. This creates an extra column of the "cost per click" of that particular key phrase used in an adwords campaign. It just gives a little more idea of competition for those words.

What do the results mean in each column starting from left to right?

• Keyword Ideas. Shows suggested key words and phrases in a search.
• Competition. One of the most miss-understood options. This is not the competition between websites and articles using those key words but competitive values for an adwords campaign giving high, medium, and low values. The higher the competition then the higher the cost per click (cpc) in dollars for those words.
• Global Monthly Searches. An average of searches for those terms world wide.
• Local Monthly Searches. An average of search terms for your location. US, Australia, etc.
• Approximate CPC. The average cost for those terms in a CPC campaign.

You'll also have a couple of tabs just below the search button to give keyword ideas or arrange the words into suggested groups. One tab id for "Keyword Ideas" and another for "Ad Group Ideas." Check out both.

Broad, Exact, or Phrase?

If you look in the left column of the page you will see some check boxes under the heading "Match Types." Check and un-check these boxes for different returns. The "match types" are:

• Broad: Search results will show synonyms and other related search terms.
• Exact: Will return a phrase containing the exact words used in the search.
• Phrase: Will return different phrases used with the search term.

When using the Google Adwords Tool for keyword research, chose 4 or 5 of the best terms that suit your current project. I choose some key phrases with low competition but with somewhat high CPC value. Choosing the higher competition words and CPC value words will make it difficult to get any ranking for your article or blog.

I do use the Google Adwords tool for a keyword research guide, but also use the keyword tools like the ones found in Jaaxy and within Wealthy Affiliate University. These will give you a more unbiased return in your keyword research.

For example I ran a search for "dog training tips" in both the Google Adwords tool and the Wealthy Affiliate keywords tool. The Wealthy Affiliate tool also gave me some key phrases not found in the adwords tool and several others not listed. Additional terms found in the WA tool include:

• free dog training tips
• dog training tips biting
• dog training methods
• dog training for obedience
• dog behavior training

You could be missing some pretty good keyword options by just using the Google tool alone. BTW: Both Jaaxy and Wealthy Affiliate have FREE membership to test drive their systems.

Use operators when doing a web search in Google.

I've gone into a little more detail on my site but you can also get an idea of your competition by searching Google using "operators". These are short phrases applied in front of a key word or phrase when performing a search using Google. These would include "intext:, inurl:, inanchor: intitle:" and others. Using these operators will show search results of keywords used in the text, url, anchor text, and titles of other pages.

No mater which keyword research guide you use, the results are only meant for suggestion and not fact. Always use your own judgment when choosing key words or phrases for your promotions. Target the ones that work well in your promotions and work on the ones that don't. All will be of good use in your niche marketing campaigns.