So why do we use Hubpages? Well I do not know about you but I use in partly for fun, testing a few ideas out in the internet world, and for making a few $$$’s along the way.

However I imagine most people signing up these days just want to make some money out of it. I mean plenty of other sites out there say they are doing just that, but if you take your time to read the good ones you will find that instant riches are not what you should expect.

You can write an excellent article but if no one can find it you are not going to make any money are you? Even if you are on Hubpages not to make money, you should at least do a little groundwork prior to writing your article in order to ensure you can get it somewhere decent in the search engines with little effort.

So how do you do this? Well I explained a few things in my article Home Based Business Residual Income, but I will go into more detail concerning keywords with this article.

I use what I call an ‘Adsense Elite Keyword’, as by targeting a specific keyword in our article we can manipulate where it appears in search engines, and which Adsense ads appear. No the last bit is very important. If your topic involves the phrase ‘dog poo’ more than any other then you may get in the first 50 searches and get visitors, but if they click an Adsense ad you will be very lucky to scrape $0.02.

If on the other hand you targeted for example ‘New York Finance’ and managed to get in a decent place in the search engines (unlikely without additional work), then when someone visits your article and clicks an Adsense ad, you get a split of a possible $15.00, much better eh? You would have a job actually getting anything of that value these days, but plenty of $1-$3 opportunities exist.

Now you may notice I said I call this an Adsense elite keyword when you will notice it is actually a phrase. Whether it is one word or 10, it is still effectively a keyword. However, you can also refer to these phrases that contain a few words as a Longtail. ‘How To....’ questions are regarded as Longtails, ‘Advice on.....’ is another, also nonsense keywords are also Longtails, ‘tracking clicks Adsense today’ does not really make sense, but it may be searched for a few thousand times.

So now you know the basics of keywords, how do you find one?

This is not an exact science and can take a bit of experience, and can cost people a lot of money going round buying everything the marketers throw at them, so not only do I hope I can point you in the right direction of getting your articles a few more hits, but also save you money.

Your first stop is obviously coming up with a topic. Let us say ‘dog’ (everyone uses dog as an example!). Our first port of call is the Free part of Wordtracker, but I do not recommend buying the full version, it is pricey and you can get more information much cheaper.

So we enter the word ‘dog’ and see what we get. Ignore those with 1,000’s of searches as they are too competitive, unless you are writing about a niche subject. I am looking for my Adsense elite keyword with 5 words or more for this example. So I now have: ‘purina dog food coupons’ and ‘dogs for adoption in wisconsin’. (You should have a long list).

Then we want to run them through the Adwords Keyword Tool.

You will see that ‘purina dog food coupons’ is about 75% competitive, and ‘dogs for adoption in wisconsin’ has about 25% which is fine, as you are looking for 50% or less. However, the latter one only pays $0.05 so is not worth the effort. So neither is really any good, but this tool gives you the related searches as well. So by putting the lists in Advertiser Competition order, we can clearly see what is available.

Now from one list I can see that ‘hearing dogs for deaf people’ can earn you a split of $1.25 and has 1000 searches. The search volume is a Google estimate, you can usually double that to include all internet searches. Another one is ‘dog food proplan’, I have no idea what that is buy pays a split of $1.43 on Adsense, and again 1000 search volume.

Even if you end up being a little off topic with the article you intended to do in the first place when finding some Adsense elite keywords, you can always do research for information on it, you are on the internet after all!

Now when you have a final list of phrases you have not actually finished. Doh!!

You now need to search for these in Google and click the top 10 results to see what Pagerank they are (you need the Google Toolbar or another similar plug-in). You are looking for a few with no Pagerank, and with what I term a ‘drilled down’ topic. That is the page appears in sub..sub..(etc)...directories. So you are not interested in the domain name, nor the domain page, but where the information actually is. So if it is www.hearing dogs for deaf people.ltd.uk you are not interested, if it is for instance www.xxxxxxxxx.com/dogs/articles/ hearing dogs for deaf people.html then you stand a chance of breaking into that list, especially if it has a zero Pagerank.

Now that is the free way of doing it and is pretty long winded, for those of us who are lazy or do a lot of article writing then plenty of software is around to help, the problem is, as with Wordtracker they charge you high monthly fees and yet they do not supply all the information you need. Now I have used probably everything ever devised for keyword research and I dare not even try to add up what I have spent, but the majority of it ended up gathering dust. One piece of software I have been using for over 4 years now is called Keyword Analyzer, and even after all this time and a one-off fee I still get updates free.

I am not reviewing Keyword Analyzer here but it does all of the above free stuff and much more. It lists all the Adwords campaigns for each keyword so you can tell if it is competitive or not, it lists all the Adsense values, but it also supplies information on Yahoo, MSN (now Bing), Miva and Enhance giving you a full spectrum. Now all that gives you more than doing it free but it has a magic trick that I have not seen other software or services do and that is it lists the top 10 (or more) searches for each keyword. Including the pages directory, Pagerank, Keyword density, whether it is in the Title tag, bold, italic, etc.

Let me just say that without Keyword Analyzer I would never have written this article for you. However I will say this, if you are a beginner, use the free stuff for a while and learn from it before spending money, and if you only do the odd article keep your money. If you do want to make money from Hubpages and other sources on the internet though you will need a powerful tool that gives you information the majority do not have, and knowledge in this game is money.

If you want to earn a few hundred $$$’s a month from Hubpages, you need to ensure you have a good number of articles, and that they at least can be found via an Adsense elite keyword. Once you are indexed in the search engine one of the best ways to move up the search list is to get back links pointing to your page, but do not use spam techniques. My Home Based Business Residual Income article covers ways to do this.

Whatever you decide to do, do not going standing in ‘dog poo’ as part of your research!