The Internet is a huge and unwieldy animal....and finding your niche market is fantastic... but how will anyone find you?

Have you heard or seen SEO... that stands for Search Engine Optimization... and it is more than just placing keywords on your hidden meta tags, and in your text... it's about writing relevant text around the popular keywords so that the search engine crawlers pick up the page with high relevance.

Recently I was hired to write content for a business blog, the challenge here is that it is a new blog without ANY following.. In fact, I'm starting the blog from scratch - (and still tweaking but you can take a peek http://matthijssenonline.com/) My audience should be small business owners in New Jersey looking for a full service computer solution company. It's a real challenge to find words that a business owner would use online and not get buried on the 144,998,009 page. It's a challenge... and here are some tools

1. Ask.com, provides a selection of searches on different categories. This URL will show previous weeks most popular searches Click Here

2. Dogpile, another search engine provides an interesting glimpse at currently searched words Click Here

3. Google Trends, this is my favorite. Google Trends allows you to put in your keyword and check it's ranking... AND, allows you to compare several keywords. Turns out that something I thought would be popular... sigh... wasn't even found. Click Here

4. Google Zietgeist, this is another fantastic tool from Google. This is a compilation of several tools that allow you to check out what's popular. Click Here

5. Yahoo Buzz, This seems like a fairly new tool. Honestly, I just found it today and since the URL says "beta" they obviously changed something. :O) I checked out the site and it looks like a great collection of most searched topics and keywords on Yahoo. Click Here

Once you have found the relevant search words, you need to incorporate them into your blog or web content. Blogging is a great way to education and drive traffic to sites. Recently I purchased a great ebook (54 pages) on how to earn money blogging... I've been blogging for years and I never knew... how much I didn't know. Anyway, if you are interested in checking it out you can Click Here!