In our post, “How to Make a Dollar Online”, we mentioned using “article marketing and SEO” as a technique to drive traffic to a website. That post was all about Squidoo Lenses however the above mentioned technique would work for any type of website regardless of it was a blog, static page, mini-page, “lens” etc.

The first step in using article marketing to improve your search engine optimization is to find a profitable niche. If your main method of monetizing traffic is some form of Pay-Per-Click advertising, such as Google AdSense then the first factor you should consider is how much each keyword pays per-click on average.

The problem is that there is usually a good deal of search engine competition for the highest paying keywords. If you are using a method such as blog commenting, then competition on the search engines doesn’t really affect you. If however you are planning to use SEO to drive traffic to your site, then search engine competition is a huge factor.

When researching niches from a SEO point of view, the single most important factor is keyword analysis. Wordtracker.com is an excellent subscription based service for keyword analysis. At Feedback Secrets however, we do not believe you need to spend a lot of money to start making money online. With this in mind we are all about starting out with free research.

Wordtracker.com just happens to provide a valuable free version of its service at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. The subscription version of wordtracker.com provides more detail in its reports, including an estimated break down of how many searches are performed for a specific keyword, on each of the major search engines. The free version of this service clumps the search traffic from all engines together and simply provides an estimate of the total daily search traffic for a particular keyword on all engines.

Even with our statistics all clumped together we can still get a good idea how much traffic will come from each search engine. According to the article “Nielson NetRating Search Engine Ratings” on SearchEngineWatch.com in 2006 Google had 49.2% of all search engine traffic, Yahoo had 23.8%, and MSN had 9.6%.

Usually search engine marketers aim to get in the top two results for a particular keyword on a specific engine, since the top two results get the majority of search engine traffic. The article “Distribution of Clicks on Google’s SERP” on SeoResearcher.com references a study conducted at Cornell University by Laura A. Granka, Thorsten Joachims and Geri Cay. According to this study the number one search result on Google received 56.36% of clicks and the number two search result received 13.35% of clicks.

The sign of a good keyword from an SEO point of view is a decent amount of traffic with a relatively small amount of competition. A simple method that we can use to separate good keywords from bad ones is to take the number of searches per day and divide them by the number of competing websites on Google.

For example let’s take the term “dog”, when I type it into the free keyword tool it appears that the term dog currently gets around 31,034 searches a day. When I type the term dog into Google however I can see in the blue bar, near the upper right hand corner of the screen that Google has around 437,000,000 pages indexed that rank for the keyword “dog.” That gives us a ratio of about .000071. We can compare that to the keyphrase “yellow labradors” which gets around 282 searches per day and only has around 686,000 competing pages indexed on Google. Labrador has a ratio of about .00041.

The higher the ratio the better, so any optimization work done for the term “yellow labradors” should be about five times more effective then the same amount of work for the term “dog”.

Keyword Analysis is only the first half of Article Marketing, we will be following this post up more on posting articles and building backlinks, in an upcoming post.