Before building a website that showcases your products or service you must first identify who it is that will be purchasing said products and services. Not all traffic is good traffic. Many webmasters target the "high traffic terms" that have little relevance to their market instead of the "targeted terms" that have the highest conversion. Target all your relevant terms ("highest traffic first") and don't go for so called "hot terms" that will eat up their bandwidth and produce no sales.

Scenario: Green widgets are the hottest item on the market, you create a great looking web site perfectly optimized for green widgets to take advantage of this traffic flux. You own the market and you are #1 for every possible term targeting the green widget field! But you sell blue widgets and no one who wants green widgets will buy blue widgets. Now you are stuck with a bandwidth bill, hosting fees, development costs and NO SALES!

You are not the only one to make this mistake, many other blue widget dealers saw that "green widgets" had 1,000,000 searches and "blue widgets" had 10,000 and they also chose to target the green widget terms. There was however that one "blue widget" dealer who saw the light, he targeted "blue widgets" while you were all confused and now owns the top results for all "blue widget" terms and is enjoying a hefty 5% conversion rate and has made 500 sales from his 10,000 hits. With a low bandwidth bill and little effort as no one was competing our smart little "blue widgets king" is laughing.

You however have a 0% conversion and can brag about your 1,000,000 hits all day long but at the end of the day you are broke because you did not do your research lest you would have known that "green widget" buyers hate "blue widgets"

It seems that the prevailing idiom is that the more traffic one receives the more money one makes, NOT TRUE! The more sales one makes the more money makes WHAT A CONCEPT!

There is a finite number of people on the net that will buy your products and services PERIOD! This of course includes those not looking for your exact products but that you are able to convert into customers. Target these people and you can't go wrong.

Proper keyword research is the cornerstone of building a successful business online. The next page is possibly the most important page in this tutorial and the most important step to get right if you want to succeed online.