Keyword Research help!

[Fostinwd]

I'm trying to do the right thing, I'm reading a lot of blogs, forums and tips from everywhere.. I'm trying to understand this business before setting up my website. I want to take everything with calm but I want to put my site up NOW! hehe. Everything seems very promising! and that's keeping me very motivated.

I'm struggling choosing the right keywords to focus on. I'm using google ad words and word tracker to check what are the most searched phrases and words and I've also created a spreadsheet with all the info..

NOW, the thing is, I don't know which ones should I take... Big words like "play poker online" are not competitive because there are big big names in the search results so that's definitely not a good choice...

I know I want a review site with good offers and bonuses...

Has the number of search results anything to do with the keywords I'm going to pick?

This is what I found:

online poker reviews: 47.900.000
poker reviews: 44.500.000
best poker rooms: 35.300.000
online poker rooms: 22.000.000
best poker online: 15.800.000
best poker deals: 12.800.000
online poker bonus: 7.110.000
poker bonus: 6.990.000
poker rooms: 2.570.000
poker bonus codes: 1.220.000
poker bonuses: 1.120.000
poker deals: 1.260.000

So, basically I have to choose a keyword phrase that is highly searched and with little competence in google?

let's say:

WORDTRACKER: 200
Nº of GOOGLE RESULTS: 350.000

is better than...

WORDTRACKER: 300
Nº of GOOGLE RESULTS: 350.000.000

SORRY MY IGNORANCE!!
I feel like I know I have to do this first, but I'm a bit disoriented.. I hope some of you could help me out cause I'm a bit lost, I'm new to SEO, and I don't want to miss this step cause I've read it's vital in the process....

THANKS A LOT IN ADVANCE!

=)

[Strider1973]

Welcom to PAL, the best place to learn about the poker affiliate business.

What you did is checking the search volume for poker realted terms. In a second step, you have to find terms that are often searched for, but where it is "easy" to rank for. You have to get to page 1 in the SERPs (top 10 results of Google) to get a significant amount of traffic.

I think its fair to say that you will have no chance at all (unless you want to spend xx,xxx$) to get to page 1 with any of those terms within the next 12 months.

If I were you, I would try to focus on the Spanish speaking market and pick a three worded phrase to optimize for. This way, you avoid the stiff english-speaking competition and your chances for success are far higher.

[Fostinwd]

I was thinking about that.. but at the moment I want to start off with the english market and then maybe tranlsate the site to spanish and see what happens...

My question is, for what is this whole keyword research process for? I know I want a reviews site, is the keyword research important to write the articles properly to include the right keywords? or is it essential before setting up the website? I guess not everyone is ranking within the top 10 to make some money in this business...

[MPC]

Keyword selection is the name of the game, and it plays a huge part on your bottom line. Naturally, people are secretive about what keywords they target, to some degree. It's not hard to figure out what keywords a webpage is targetting simply by reading it. So a quick anlysis of what the competition is doing isn't difficult to do. This is why some people won't even tell what sites they own. If you find a cash cow, keep it to yourself. If you go around balbbing about it, it won't be long before someone with more experience and more resssources than you completely knocks you off the first page.

However, there's a difference between a traffic generating keyword, and a money generating keyword. Basically, your challenge (and everyone else's) is to find keywords that have a good conversion ratio with low competition. That usually means a lower seacrh volume, but that's OK. It's very dificult for a new site to rank well for the typical poker terms and bonus terms. It's not impossible, give it time and throw money at it and you might get there. But since the market is somewhat saturated, or at least very cmpetitive (english market anyway), I would focus my efforts on longtail keywords. The trick is to find what will work, and while some research can give you ideas, you'll only find out the potential by trying it out. And of course, you'll sometimes find interesting keywords purely by accident as your site grows and collects data over time.

I also think that a long term goal is to "own" the first page via multiple sites. If you have a good keyword and can get multiple sites to rank well for it, your earnings will increase significantly. What's better? Ranking #3 for XYZ, or ranking 2, 4, 6, 10? Don't worry about that for now. You're not there yet. But if you can do it with one site, you should be able to repeat the process with others.

While this post doesn't exactly anwser your original question, it tells you why your question probably won't be anwsered as clearly as you would like it to be

[Fostinwd]

MPC, I get your idea and thank you so much for your answer. It's very helpful =)