I was going through some posts in one of the very popular forums recently and saw to my surprise that some guy said he got ranked on the 5th position out of about 13 million results in google less than 5 hours after he got indexed. That, of course got me wondering. I took a look at the keyword he targeted and knew immediately that the keyword would never earn him a dime. Why, because he was targeting keywords no one was looking for.

These days, you will find that there are many people who will tell you that they can easily get indexed and ranked favorably high within 24 hours. I am not saying it is not possible. But the majority of the tactics are complete blackhat. So, how do you choose the right keywords for your website?

This takes a lot of thinking because sometimes what we think people should be searching for comes out as completely different from what they are really searching for. In the hey days, to was such a very heavy task to try and put yourself in shoes of your potential client or website visitor and think like they would. Of course this never works most of time because we really don’t know what is going on in their heads. But thankfully, there are lots of keyword tools online that you can use to brainstorm.

To rank higher, you would have to start using keywords that may not have huge volumes but are extremely targeted. These are often referred to as long tail keywords. If you are starting out, these are the keywords to target unless you stumble on a market that has not even been tapped at all. Use the keyword tools to determine what keywords to use. The keywords you are looking for are mostly 3-5 word phrases. Once you dominate these keywords, you will be able to rank very high in the search engines.