Now, before we continue with this last part I would suggest you go to my Setting up your PC for Article Writing, then download and install Firefox and the Pagerank plugin.  We’ll be using them extensively here.  The plugin is a great keyword research tool.

In our last part we were considering 4 keywords,  braun electric shavers, electric shaver braun, electric shaver, electric shavers.

What we need to do now is assess the competition we’ll face if we use these keywords.

Remember, our goal is to get onto the first page of google, second page is ok too, but page 812,388 is unacceptable, even page 5 is pushing it..

So, open up Firefox and then go to google, type in your first keyword. 

What you need to do is click on the last result on page one, then look at the bottom right of the Firefox browser, it’ll list the pagerank and alexa rating of the page.

This is what I have..

Click on the link and lets see what the ranking is..

You’ll have to mouse over the number to see, mine says Pagerank of 3/10 and Alexa of over 2.5 million.

eHow articles, when they are published have a pagerank of ‘Unranked’ and an Alexa rating of 468.  This will go to 0 and 468 after a few days.

Google, the most important search engine will use a combination of mostly Pagerank and some Alexa rank, to determine what it lists, the other engines, yahoo for example will use the Alexa rank over Pagerank.  You can confirm this by going to yahoo and doing the same search.  My end of page one search lists target, with a pagerank of ‘Unranked’ but an Alexa rating of 274.  The last result on page 2 has a rank of 1/10 and an Alexa of 1.5 million or so, we’ll land high up on page two with this keyword.

How can we use this info to our advantage you say??  Easy, with minimal article promotion it’s quite easy to get our article to a rank of 2/10, not enough for page one,  our article, with this keyword will land on page 2-5, not bad.  But can we do better?  Check the other keywords..

Well, well..   “electric shaver braun”  looks real good, in fact I bet we can land on page one with this one.  The last entry on the first page was an amazon affiliate astore, we can easily knock him off and get on page one.

We need to make this our lead keyword for our article.  Going back to google adwords, we see that this keyword has an average monthly volume of 40k, and pays a bit over $2.  Not bad, not great.  We need to hedge our bets…

If you remember part 1of this guide, my rule #1 and #3 contradicted each other.  Here’s where I’ll explain that.

You see there are two schools of thought when it comes to making money online with articles:

1. Get tons of traffic and clicks, even if they pay just .05 cents each
2. Get little traffic and clicks, but they pay $5 each

We’re going to go both routes.

First off we’ll use electric shavers braun for the page 1 ranking and the traffic.  Use it in your article title, once or twice in your intro paragraph, then a few more times in your steps or tips/warning section.  Shoot for a total of 5 or so times

Go back to google adwords, type in electric shavers and enable the CPC column, then double click on that column to get the high paying keywords.

If you scroll down to “Additional keywords to consider”  something should jump out at you..  “braun electric razers’, pays a bit more, but with less traffic.  You’ll want to use this ‘payout’ keyword twice in your article, just to get ads to show up.

For the payout keyword there’s no reason to check the ranking of pages because we’re using the other keyword to get traffic.

So, to summarize.

• Check the ranking of pages using your target keyword
• Choose the highest traffic one where you can land on page 1-2
• Choose another keyword based on payout
• Use the traffic keyword in your title, and 4 more times
• Use the payout one two times in your article, just to get ads

The topic I’ve used here doesn’t have much in the way of variation in keyword payouts, I chose this topic to make you really look at the numbers  and to really use those keyword tools.  Other topics will have wildly varying payouts and traffic and be easier to analyze.

Some keywords aren’t article friendly, they just sound wrong.  If you’ve looked at articles on eHow (and elsewhere) you may have noticed bad English article titles.  This is why that happens, to get the keyword credit in your article, you have to use it exactly the way google adwords lists it. 

In my next post I’ll talk about how to sneak keywords into your article so people don’t notice them…

I’d appreciate any comments y’all have on this, especially suggestions.

Possibly Related Posts:

• A New Keyword Tool | Detecting Commercial Intention
• Google Search as a Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• Wordtracker Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• The Keyword Selection Guide – Part 2