Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best and reliable Internet marketing tactics to drive loads of traffic to your website. However, this technique is much more complex than other traffic generating methods out there in the market. If you are a newbie to SEO, then your learning curve will be a very steep one.

To cut a long story short, every SEO campaign depends on one very important process: selecting the right keyword or phrase. Hit on the right keyword, and you will laugh all the way to the bank. Make a mistake with your keywords, and your Internet home business will fail miserably.

So how do you select the best keywords or phrases for your SEO tactics? Below are the 5 holy grails of SEO which you must implant into your head.

1. Your keyword MUST have a high demand.

If there is no demand for the keyword that you are focusing on, then there is only one outcome: zero sales. And zero sales usually mean that you can close down your online business. So how do you find a keyword in high demand?

The answer is simple: find out how many times that particular keyword has been searched for by Internet users all over the world. You can achieve this by using a free tool such as nichebot. This tool allows you to enter the keywords you desire, and then it will display the number of times they have been searched for within a certain period.

A count of more than 50,000 is a good start. Also, you can use a software called Good Keywords to help give you more ideas on selecting your ideal keywords or phrases.

2. The lower the competition, the better.

You wouldn’t want your website to disappear into a maze of millions of other websites in the same niche as yours, do you? So go for keywords with a high count, but low competition.

If you don’t have a lot of competition, you will find it a lot easier to corner the market that is associated with your keyword. Although Internet marketing is very different from traditional marketing, the basic business concept is still the same: low supply plus high demand equals to a highly profitable business. If your website is among only a handful of other sites in the same niche related to a particular keyword, then you stand good chance of being very successful in your Internet home business.

3. Use 3 or 4 keyword phrases

This is one search engine optimization tactic that can potentially boost your sales to a new level. Why is this so? A prospect that is ready to buy something usually types in 3 or 4 words as their search term so that his search is more specific, and there is a much higher chance of getting what he is looking for.

On the other hand, the casual Internet surfer who is logging onto the net just too past time will normally key in only one or two words as their search terms. They have absolutely no intention to buy, because they are only looking for certain bits of information to feed their curiosity.

Therefore, if you want to build a more profitable Internet home business, focus more on 3 or 4 keyword phrases.

4. Your keyword should have a high Cost Per Click (CPC).

A keyword which has a high CPC rate will ensure bigger profits for you, especially if you are playing the Google Adsense or Yahoo Advertising games. Just in case if you are wondering what is Adsense, this is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program that pays you every time a visitor to your site clicks on a particular ad that is displayed in your web pages. So the higher the CPC, the more you will earn.

You would need to do some research on the going rate for your keywords by doing a search at adsense arena, and the corresponding CPC for a number of keywords will appear. Want to determine the bidding price of your keywords? You can try the free bidding tool found in Overture.

5. Choose a keyword that fetches a number of relevant ads.

This is very important for Adsense. You can try to run a search of your keyword at Google. On the results page, notice the row of links on the right side. These are PPC ads, and they are, more or less, the same ads that will appear on your own web pages if you decide to use the same keyword.

As a rule of thumb, choose the keyword that fetches at least 5 relevant ads. This is to ensure a higher Click Through Rate (CTR) for your PPC campaigns. You certainly would not want any non-relevant ads to populate your web page, otherwise your CTR will suffer miserably.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the best and reliable Internet marketing tactics to drive loads of traffic to your website. However, this technique is much more complex than other traffic generating methods out there in the market. If you are a newbie to SEO, then your learning curve will be a very steep one.