Have you ever wondered what a keyword is and why it is called that? Keywords are your key to Internet Marketing success, it is that easy or difficult as the case may be. The name comes from the fact that the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing etc. all need a key in order to perform searches. The name keyword or phrase (now commonly called long tailed keywords) was coined to describe the action of the search engine which uses this "key" to focus in on related sites that may be of interest.

Of course over the years since the inception of the internet levels of sophistication have been added to the search process, but it is still driven to a large extent by the keyword. Google have gone futher than most and they will show your site when people type in related keywords. A related keyword is one where Google has found that the final site chosen by the searcher was also being found under that related term.

Why is this important to us as Internet Marketers? Well when you search for the term Internet Marketing there are 337,000,000 results as of today and rising, so we wouild have little chance of ranking on the first page, which is where we need to be in order to get any significant traffic. However if we chose a related long tailed keyword such as "30 days to success in internet marketing" there are 13,900,00 results and a much better chance of being on the first page of Google results and my article of this name is 3rd in the natural ranking and first in the exact match results, as of when I am writing this article.

Hopefully this will have clarified for a lot of you what exactly a "long tailed" keyword is and how it can be used effectively to get more traffic. The advantage of this phrase is that it also gives us a chance of being ranked fore the phrase Internet Marketing too! Google will use this ranking in providing their related results for "Internet Marketing" so you get a double chance of ranking.

In order to find good related keywords we can use the Google keyword tool for Adwords users and their wonder wheel or a tool such as Market Samurai, but a better solution that I have found rests with the Internet Marketing Universities. These provide much more in terms of tools for Internet Marketing and also have members forums, success clubs, unlimited hosting and web site developing tools to name but a few of their advantasges. if you have any questions just add them here and I will be glad to respond.