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 explore various articles on small business website optimization or ask any small business SEO agency that provides push promotion for websites, you will always be confronted with 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?

If we define 100 websites as low competition, is it feasible to define 150 websites as high competition? So, in other words, what is the meaning of high and low here? And this is the issue I handle 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 does high enough traffic mean?

The answer depends on your business and your goals. To achieve a brilliant success in online marketing, you should have a definite plan like your goals and the time needed to achieve them. 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, I will make a random assumption that you like to earn $1000 per month. Then, your goal is to drive internet surfers to your website that can make you $1000 monthly and this should be your “high enough traffic”. But the exciting question is how to calculate this traffic in an accurate way?

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 simply your affiliate commission that you earn in case somebody bought the product from your affiliate link.

Conversion rate is the amount of your internet surfers who may be interested to buy your product or service. 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.

You may calculate with 3% conversion rate, but I like to design my search engine marketing setup using a conversion rate of 1% as this is a very realistic rate.

Total money you like to make online is simply the cash you like to earn monthly, which is in our case the $1000.

So, now you can calculate how many visitors per month you should drive to your website in order to achieve the desired income. In case you like to earn more you may work on increasing the amount of visitors to your website or you should try to increase the 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:

- Enrich your sales web page with promises that you can really deliver.

- Offer your visitors an extra free bonus.

- Mention a deadline that should be met in order to get the extra 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. You may get a number between 0 and thousands of websites that you have to compete against them.

The answer to the question of a “low enough competition”is depending 100% on the planed destination, 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 optimal choice to submit your articles, if the number of competitors is approximately 3,000 websites.

- WordPress Blog: Is the optimal choice to submit your articles, if the number of websites that are optimized for the same keyword is not more than 1000 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. Nevertheless, the results and experiments I mentioned in this article worked on fine bases since 6 months now and, therefore; it is a good idea to try it when you finally decided to set up your 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 else is interested to get his website seen by millions of new internet surfers with the help of search engine ranking optimization? I got position #3 on Google first page for a highly competitive term. 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.