Choosing proper keywords for your web publishing campaign is one of the most critical planning stage of launchin your online business that is often neglected. Once I had a client who asked me what his target keyword should be and he has been making money online for over three years!

Your keywords dictates your customer targeting, thus it does the big part of your customer targeting for you. Better targeted your traffic, better your conversion to sales it will be for you.

Let's use an example of a parent who is looking to buy a dress for a teenage daughter. It is three months away from buying a dress. A parent will go to the computer to do some preliminary query on the dress. Type "dress" on Yahoo will yield around 700 million searches. But with a month to go and this person had more time to think about what to get for the teenager, a parent types "black long chinese silk dress moderate price". It is now whittled down to 10,700 searches.

It is easier to rank well with your long-tailed keywords because of fewer competition as seen by 10,700 searches versus 700,000,000 websites.

Two things were illustrated by this example.

1. A shopper who still has some time does not make a very good prospect for a sale as this person only knows to buy a dress. This same person is a very motivated about buying a dress and is very specific about what to buy with a month to go. This person would make a very good prospect: Indeed, you want this person to visit your dress website, if you have one.

2. 700 million websites reference to "dress" and they are all fighting for a business of selling a dress. But by being specific to "Black long chinese silk dress moederate price", it weeded out many competitors that do not offer this specific commodity, thereby reducing the competition. This is great if you are selling a black dress online.

So, by using a long tailed keywords "black long chinese silk dress moderate price", you will be able to get buyers who are very specific about what they want to buy. By definition of this specificity, they are much closer to the buying stage and will need a far less nudging to convert them to your sale.

To sum it up, we need to use long-tailed keywords so that we can better select more serious traffic that is specific about what to buy, thus eliminating a casual browsers that has no intention of buying anything from you. This is why it is so vital to sit down and specify your long-tailed keywords before designing your website, let alone beginning your web promotion campaign.

I will explain how I brainstorm a long-tailed keywords in my next article.

Charlie Hearns

Online shopping center