Keywords: The Basic Unit Of E-Commerce.

Traffic is the key right? The more targeted the traffic the better right? And how do you get traffic? Well the simple answer is that you need to have high search engine rankings but that is such a general and unhelpful answer. So I am going to try and give you a better idea of the inner workings of a search engine ranking including the most fundamental and obvious and therefore most underestimated factors, namely keywords.

Keywords are just that key words that people type into the blank for the search engine that describe what they are interested in finding out about. Basically the search engine tries to match the keyword with the content of millions of different web pages that it crawls through and ranks in order from most applicable to least the pages whose content has any thing to do with the keyword.

Now the search engine has different criteria that it weights in its evaluation of the relatedness of a web page to specific keywords. Unfortunately for those interested in high rankings these criteria are for the search engines to know and for us in the internet marketing field to find out. In other words they are unspoken. That isn't to say however that we don't know anything about them but it is to say that we have only found out about them through trial and error testing--we find out what works and stick with it.

There is another problem with this though. That is that the search engine, in order to give all pages a chance and to keep the content on the internet fresh are always changing their criteria and trying to improve their search results as far as relevancy is concerned. So the testing is always going on and those who are good at seeing the trends and predicting changes are able to stay successful in their field. One must remember though that despite all of these changes, there is nothing changing the way a customer searches for his interests on the internet.

So before you worry about all the complicated criteria you must target your content to the appropriate keywords. There are many tools that help you to research keywords, and many are free. Basically you are looking for keywords that are searched for the most that describe your product or the market your product is included in well enough that people who come to your page through that search will agree that you have what they were looking for. This is the essence of "targeted" traffic. Think about it for a minute, you can have all the traffic in the world come to your page but you will only get sales from those that are in need of what you have to offer. It only makes sense then to bring those people to your site.