by Lynette Alice

Created on: December 16, 2009

Using keywords in online writing is for many people a fact of life, however not everyone is sure how to use them correctly, or even what good keywords are. While writing online is not the same for every individual as some are just looking for an outlet to get their wrok read and others are writing to earn money while being read, proper keyword usage is essential to those looking to generate income. While courses an countless keyword analytic tools are available to writers, some free and some not, and there are hundreds of websites offering a huge diversity and help and advice, some good and some bad, hopefully when you finish reading this article you will have some effective simple tools to improve your keyword usage and help raise your income.

Keeping things very simple to start, a keyword is a word used to search for information which relates to a topic. A keyword phrase is a combination of two words used to carry out the same task, and long tail keywords are phrases that consist of three to four words which lead a searcher to a very specific piece of information.

Deciding which is best for you is up to you, however long tail keywords are usually the best. To help demonstrate this, let's look at the following example. Suppose you are writing an article about your hair salon and want to use good keywords to help increase traffic as much as possible.

Salon, is a keyword which does aptly describe your business, but when you google the word salon, you can expect about 138 million results to return. That is obviously too broad to do you much good.

Your next step is to try a keyword phrase, in this case "hair salon" will be the example we use. When you google that, the results cut down dramatically to about 26.5 million returns. While that is more specific, it is also still quite a mountain to try to climb to be seen amongst the competition.

Finally you will move to trying a long tail keyword. It's been established you have a hair salon, but what else is there about it that can help narrow the field? Let's say your hair salon targets women, adding that to create "women's hair salon" would cut the search results to about 1.15 million returns. Still you can do better.

Adding in a fourth word is when you really narrow the field down and give yourself the best opportunity to be found without creating too long of a phrase that becomes annoyingly repetitive to the reader. Let's suppose your salon is located in Muncie, Indiana. Rather than add Indiana to the phrase, try

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