It is an obvious fact that each online business owner should know not little but a lot about search engine marketing setup. This idea involves optimizing your website for the search engines to think that your website provides useful and rich-content information and, therefore, you will be able to improve search engine ranking.

This is especially effective since paid advertising like pay per click is relatively expensive and sometimes not affordable by most of the beginners who are on a limited budget. On the other side, organic traffic resulted from ethical search engine optimization (SEO) is free and targeted providing that you avoid any black-hat SEO training.

Therefore, search engine marketing setup must be at the top of your list when you like to spread the word about your business. To achieve this goal properly, you should consider the right keywords with the right density.

But the interesting question is: What are the proper keywords?

If you browse different articles on small business website optimization or consult any small business SEO agency that offers push promotion for websites, you will always find this sentence: “You should target the keywords that receive high traffic and enjoy low competition”.

My personal point of view is that this answer is not clear enough as the terms low and high are very relative. Should you consider 100 searches per day a high search volume? If yes, then should you consider 90 searches per day a low volume? Additionally, if the number of the websites that compete for your target search term is 100, should you define this competition high or low?

In case these 100 websites can be considered as a low competition, should 150 websites considered as a high competition? So, in other words, what is the meaning of high and low here? And this is exactly the point I try to clarify in this article.

In other words, to set up the optimal search engine marketing setup, you need to consider the search terms that receive “high enough” traffic per month and at the same time enjoy “low enough” competition.

a) What should you define under the term high enough traffic?

There is no clear and unique answer as it totally depends on the type of your business and your goals. To succeed in online business, you should decide your goal versus time. I.e. it should be clear for you from the very beginning how much money you like to earn online and after how much time.

So, let us assume you like to earn $1000 per month. Then, you should drive visitors to your website that make you $1000 per month and this traffic is your “high enough traffic”. But the new question is how to calculate this traffic accurately?

You can simply use this formula:

Total Income per Month= Number of Visitors per Month x Conversion Rate x Income per Sale

In the above mentioned formula, all factors are known except the number of visitors per month. Specifically:

Income per sale is the amount of money or commission you earn when you achieve a sale.

Conversion rate is the percentage of the whole visitors who may buy from you. For instance, 3% conversion rate means that 100 internet surfers are dropped by your website and only 3 out of these 100 decided to buy your product. This factor depends on your product, sales letter, etc.

It is feasible and realistic to setup your search engine marketing with 3% conversion rate but I prefer not to be so optimistic and use instead a conversion rate of 1%.

Total income per month is simply the desired income you like to earn per month, which is in this example our $1000.

So, it should be feasible and quite possible for you to calculate how much traffic you need to stop by your website in order to make your desired income achievable. In case that you are not satisfied with the money you make, you have 2 choices. Either you should increase your traffic volume or working on increasing your conversion rate.

Increasing the amount of visitors to your website involves:

- Ethical optimization of your website by combining online and offline optimization.

- Submit more articles to get more quality back links.

- Update your website frequently.

- Combine article marketing and web 2.0 services.

Increasing the conversion rate of your website involves:

- Optimize your sales letter with realistic promises.

- Offer your visitors an extra free bonus.

- Add a hard deadline that they should act before it in order to be qualified for the free bonus.

b) What does low enough competition mean?

To check the competition of a certain keyword, insert your target keyword between double quotes in Google to see how many other websites that are optimized for the same keyword. It is usually expected to find 0 or thousands of websites that are optimized for the same keyword and, therefore, you have to compete against them.

The answer to the question of a “low enough competition”is depending 100% on where you are going to submit your articles. Yes, this is correct as it is relatively sure that Google loves some certain websites and if your article -which should be optimized around a certain keyword-, is submitted there, then it has a better chance to appear on Google’s first page.

Some of the websites that Google certainly love are: ezinearticles.com, Squidoo.com, UsFreeads.com and any WordPress Blog. So, you should not overlook these cases in case you design your search engine marketing setup:

- Ezinearticles.com: Is the optimal choice to submit your articles, if your competitors websites do not exceed 10,000 websites.

- Squidoo.com: Is the best place to submit if the number of competitors is around 5,000 websites.

- UsFreeads: Is the best place to submit if the number of competitors is around 3,000 websites.

- WordPress Blog: Is the best place to submit if the number of competitors is around 1,000 websites.

It is important to notice that the above results are my results based on trial and error procedures and there is always no guarantee, if we talk about Google. However, the above results are obtained consistently for 6 months now and, therefore; it is worth to give it a try when you plan the next campaign.

This article focused a spot of light on an important issue about how to mathematically define the words low competition and high traffic. So, now you are ready to exactly decide which keywords you should target when you think of starting your search engine marketing setup.

Who is not dreaming to get his website seen by millions of new internet surfers using search engine ranking optimization? I finally got my website at rank #3 on Google first page for a very competitive keyword. So, if you are the only visitor to your website, then you can not afford to miss revealing my FREE tips to improve search engine ranking.