Selecting the right keywords is the first step in any professional search engine optimization job. And in the past, this has been a very expensive, complicated, frustrating and nerve wracking experience.

If you are just starting out, you'll be amazed to find that many professional search engine optimization companies charge thousands of dollars for this one function alone. In my opinion, that's a rip off.

However, a new service called WordTracker promises to bring some sanity back to the keyword selection process.

What's the problem? You know what your visitors are searching for. But the problem is, so do all your competitors.

If you focus on a keyword or keyword phrase that is too competitive,your chances of ranking in the top ten stink.

That's right And st Overture, the cost becomes very prohibitive very quickly if you try to target these highly competitive keywords.

Or you can go the other route. Select some obscure keyword or keyword phrase

Sure, you might rank highly for that specific term or phrase. But guess what.

It won't result in any significant increase in your web site traffic.

What WordTracker does for you is locates highly targeted niche keywords and key phrases. Your benefit:

Laser targeted non-competitive traffic.

How does WordTracker deliver these keyphrases to you?

Like all methods we research for you at SuperSystems!Says! It's an exact step by step method you can use today.

(Actually, WordTracker has several extremely useful ways to locate these targeted niche key phrases).

Let's start with the KeyWord Universe

Step #1. You enter a phrase (two or three words) that describes your business or service. Eg. 'golfing equipment', 'real estate' or 'search engine positioning'.

Step #2 Then hit the proceed button. WordTracker will search its database and return a general list of phrases related to your search term. Then select one of the general terms and click on it. This will add up to 300 related keywords to your Wordtracker "basket".

Step #3 You click the Click Here For Step 3 arrow, and you are on the page where you can print or email keywords.

Stop. Don't mail them yet.

There is a very important link for your succesful search engine optimization and pay per click campaign.

It's the competition search link.

Here's how this works and why it benefits you.

It reveals just how much traffic and how much competition there is for a particular keyword inthe directories and search engines. And for Overture, it reveals the number of searches and the bids for any keyword on your list!

This is the secret to how you bid on keywords that are relevant and have little or no competition!

Ok. Back to the step by step method:

Step # 4 Select the Keywords you think will be productive for your site. (I usually click on the top one, and then keep selecting until the amount of searches on a particular term becomes small).

Then click the competition search icon

(There's one at the top of the page on the right, and also in the footer of the page.)

Step# 5 Select up to two Search engines or Pay per click services and click on the "proceed" button at the bottom right corner of the page. (If you chose Overture, you'll have to enter a code in a small box which appear below the keyword list.)

This is where you are going to discover that some of these keywords have very few competing web pages in many of the major search engines.

These will be your targets.

The first figure to be aware of is the KEI Analysis -The KEI compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in our data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

In a nutshell: Look for the keywords near the top. The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. Which means you have a better chance of getting to the top.

(Of course this figure is not relevant to Overture, there you will be interested in the count and the actual bids).

Count - This shows the number of times a particular keyword has appeared in our database. The Wordtracker database currently holds 361 million words. A count of 147 tells us that this particular word has appeared 147 times out of 361 million (this is over a two month period).

24hrs - This is the number of predicted traffic you would expect to receive in 24hrs if you were on page one of the altavista search engine alone.

Competing- Each keyword has been submitted to the altavista search engine and the number of competing web pages given in response.

The lower the competition (particularly under 300) the easier you will find it to reach the top of altavista using this keyword.

This can really useful to avoid lousy keywords and to insure you get laser targeted traffic!

I recently did a competition search and wound up with the term "Best Affiliate Programs".