No matter what kind of advertising you're doing, whether it's Google AdWords, or doing article marketing, one thing is crucial and that is good keyword research. We all have ideas of what keywords we THINK people are looking for, but often times what people are really searching for are quite a bit different. By doing proper keyword research, you can save time and money and have optimized traffic for your top rated home based business opportunity.

To prevent yourself from repetition or having to back-track, make sure you organize your keyword research into a spreadsheet. Google documents and spreadsheets are easy to use and can be accessed by creating a free gmail account at www.gmail.com. Once you have created your account, login and look in the upper left hand corner for the word "Documents".

People who started using the internet to advertise their business 5-10 years ago could use broad terms like "home based business" and pay only a few cents per click. Today, tough competition has started to saturate many markets and cheap quality traffic is a thing of the past. To make matters worse, Google tightened the rules with their infamous quality scoring algorithm (a.k.a. "the Google Slap") in 2006 and again in 2008. Many advertisers woke up one day to see their keywords inactive with ridiculously high minimum bid requirements.

If Content is King, than Keywords are Queen.

So, where does one begin to research keywords help build your top rated home based business opportunity?

One place to start is using Google to search keywords and determine how much competition there is for them. For example if you type in the keyword "online business", the search results will be around 280,000,000 (varies quite a bit day to day, but it's always a huge number). However, if you make your keyword phrase more targeted to "ultimate home based online business", the results will be around 500,000 (can be much higher, varies daily). That is still a huge amount of searches, but as you can see by making the keywords more specific (often referred to as long tailed keywords), there will be less competition and therefore lower cost per click.

WordTracker (www.Wordtracker.com) is a great keyword tool. They offer a free version as well as a paid one. This tool is a great way to add keywords to a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign. You can also use it to get ideas for closely related keywords. WordTracker will also show you how many searches per day a specific keyword is getting. This is a tremendous help in aiding you to decide which keywords are worth your time to use in your top rated home based business opportunity advertising efforts. If your budget allows, the paid version of WordTracker.com is the most exhaustive and comprehensive keyword tool available online.

Google also has a free keyword tool which is easily used when setting up your PPC campaign. From within your campaign setup, enter a keyword phrase and click on the keyword tool. It will give you suggested keywords that you can add to your campaign if they fit your target market for your business opportunity.

Alternatively, you can go to the following site:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas. You can enter a few descriptive words or phrases.

NicheBot (www.nichebot.com) is another paid keyword research tool. They use multiple keyword sources like Google, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Along with extensive keyword help, they also have SEO and Analysis tools. Don't forget to try more targeted long tailed keywords as well as some more general ones to get an idea of how much competition there is for them.

If you're planning to use the internet to advertise your home based business opportunity, then it's important for you to get your keywords right. Do your research, make a spreadsheet of your keywords and get your marketing efforts to payoff.