It used to be the case that search engines would figure out what sites to display for a given search based on keywords from each site compared to the words in the search. But then Google came on the scene. Google indexes your entire site, not just the keywords. That’s why content is so important, you could stuff a thousand keywords onto your site but if you don’t have the content to back them up Google doesn’t care. So are keywords still that important to use?

Google may look at them to try to figure out what category your site will go into for some regular expression matching based on a users search, but it probably won’t matter unless you have a high pagerank with a ton of backlinks.

Having said all that I wouldn’t just abandon keywords on your page. No one knows how the algorithms work for search engines so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Keep using them, but focus on content and linking.

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Everyone asks quite often what is a good niche to get into when starting a website.  The truth of it is the best niche is the one you like the most and the one that you have a lot of knowledge about.  If you don’t like what your website is about you’ll have a hard time updating it.

But if you’re a glutton for punishment I can’t stop you from creating a website about something that you despise.  You can do a couple different things to determine what are high paying niches.  Google provides a tool for you to use to determine what keywords are the highest paying.  With it you can type in different keywords and see what the search volume for the keyword is.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

So you could, for example, look up a keyword for a site based on finance.  You would find that 16 million 6 hundred thousand searches for the month of september.  That’s a lot of volume so it’s bound to be a niche that advertisers are paying a lot of money for.  But that’s only half of equation.  You also need to find out how much competition there is for that keyword.  To find this you simply need to do a google search for that word.

In our case the word finance has 557 million results, that’s a lot of competition.  So sure you get a lot of searches but your website is very unlikely to show up in the first 100 pages of search results.  You’ll just have to keep looking for a good keyword to make a site around until you find one that has a good volue of searches with a small amount of competition.

The defacto answer is that health and finance are the best niches to be in, but unless you have a lot of advertising money you won’t get any traffic.

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