A "keyword" is a word or phrase that people type into search engines when looking for information. Keywords are usually phrases, like "france budget student travel." Let's assume Joe Strummer decides that he wants to play guitar. One of the first things he does is go to the web and type in "guitars." Of course, he gets millions of sites and they aren't much help.

So next time he gets a little more savvy, and types "buying guitar free tips." He wants a guitar, he wants to know how to go about buying one, and he doesn't want to pay for this information.

There are ways to discover if this phrase - "buying guitar free tips" - is the best (see below), but for now, let's assume that it is. If you want to sell guitars to people like Mr. Strummer, you need to create a page at your site that responds to this need. In other words, it needs to contain these words: "buying guitar free tips." If it does, it will come up higher in search results. (If you're not in Google's first page or two of links, you may as well not exist at all.)

Google (and the other search engines) uses a secret system for punishing and rewarding pages based upon their keyword usages (for instance, if you use "free guitar" too many times in a paragraph, you could be punished).

How do they punish you? By listing your page as #1,232,311. How do they reward you? By giving you good placement on the search page. Go to google.com and type "free acting tips", "free marketing tips", "free organizing tips", or even "free knife throwing tips" - you'll see that in every case a one of the Gracia websites comes up near the top (#1 in all cases as of this writing). We can help you achieve that, too.

Read more on www.tipzu.com, or wait for my next blog entry...