High demand and low competition equals profits from your website. But how do you find the key, as in keywords, to unlock those profits and make money online?

High demand means there are people looking for information about your niche, the more people, the more potential visitors. The more visitors your site receives, the higher the probability that you’ll make a sale or your ads will be clicked.

Low competition means you aren’t fighting for attention with thousands of other sites for these visitors.

A third ingredient necessary for website success is choosing a niche that advertisers are willing to pay for. You can have a lot of traffic and not a lot of competition, but if there are few advertisers who want to advertise for those keywords it will be difficult to make much money. Additionally the more advertisers for the keyword the more competition between the advertisers and the more money they’ll be willing to pay per click. That’s good news for you.

So let’s get started. Brainstorm a list of key words for your site. At this point the words can be general. Search engines find websites/blogs/squidoo lenses through key words and key word phrases. Think about the last time you searched on Google, what were the words you put in to find the information you wanted? Now if someone were looking for your book what words would they use? Long tail key words are phrases that narrow down the number of websites that would be appropriate.

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

Click on the Key Word Variations tab type in your key word phrases and then hit “Get More Keywords” button. You’ll receive a list of your word(s) and related words with a graphical bar which represents how often those words were searched for.

You can also to the Google tool bar and type in different key word phrases. A drop down menu will show you how many sites include those words.

For example: Enter “cheap wedding dress.” There are 75,000 matches. On the right hand side of the page count the number of Google ads associated with that phrase. If there are only one or two it means advertisers aren’t willing to pay for ads. If there are 15 or 20 or more, it means they are.

Now look at the plural “cheap wedding dresses.” There are only 36,000 matches so less competition than the singular dress but there’s about the same number of advertisers.

Key in “cheap wedding gown” and the matches drop to 11,000, even less competition. Oddly “cheap wedding gowns,” the plural has more competition.

So if your site is related to wedding dresses you would want to include “cheap wedding gown” as one of your key word phrases.

Use the key words in the meta tags of your web page. Also include the phrase as the first header on the page and then at least 3 or 4 more times in the content of the page. Search engines determine how your page relates to search requests by looking at the meta tags, the header and in the content.

You also use key word phrases as titles for articles you write that are distributed to directories. Search Engines tend to rank articles highly, and while it can be a struggle to get a web page on the first page of Google, articles have an easier time.

For example: Let’s say one of your key word phrases is “how to raise guppies.” You write an article about raising guppies. The title of the article is something like “How to Raise Guppies: 5 Tips.” You use the key word phrase once in the first paragraph, once in the middle of the article and in the closing paragraph. You then submit the article to directories. If someone is searching for ‘how to raise guppies’ your article will show up. They click on the article and then click on your website in your author’s bio box at the end of the article.

Knowing how to use keywords can help you make money online.