Newbie tutorial: why keyword lists?

It can be a little tricky when you're trying to get familiar with the concepts around keyword lists. Don't worry, it will start to make sense pretty quickly. Hopefully, this explanation won't seem to be oversimplifying things. If it does, apologies from one newbie to another -- please just bear with it -- it builds. ;)

So here's the idea: a keyword (for example, "building bridges") connects your article with the audience that's out there looking for information about building bridges. Google then finds articles about building bridges and offers a list of them to searchers, hopefully with yours somewhere near the top.

There could be a thousand articles out there about building bridges, and nobody is going to go through hundreds of pages of links to read about it.

So, ideally, for maximum traffic, your article needs to be listed on the first page of the Google search results, because everybody sees the first page. That increases the chances that you will get traffic stopping by to look at your article. Not so many go on to see the second page; fewer still see the third one, and so on.

If the "building bridges" keyword has more than 30 people searching on it, but no more than 100 websites are already out there talking about it, then you have found a good keyword with low competition, and you just increased the chances that your article will be listed on the first page of the search results.

Finding a lot of good keywords is helpful for two reasons:

1- you collect them to give yourself subject material for articles, so you will have topics to write about for awhile, and

2- you use them as springboards to keep finding more keywords -- adding to your list in layers that spin off of the previous ones.

So, to recap: the best keywords are popular among searchers, but not yet talked about by a lot of websites. When you keep building your keyword lists, you are looking to populate your list with the best choices that have this combination.

And when you keep finding more good keywords, you increase the chances that you will find the most powerful ones -- the ones that will bring the most traffic.

Think of it like this: it would be better to be a big fish in a little pond

than a little fish in a big pond.

You get the gist...

;)