The keywords are listed in descending order, according to number of requests per month - and not according to amount of competition. Therefore, your goal here is to first choose least popular keywords, and then select those with greatest amount of competition.

LESSON TO BE LEARNED: The less competition you have, greater your chance of achieving a top ten position. There is a good chance that 99.9% of people you are competing with don't even know what META tags are, so if there is very little competition, then success is at hand.

An explanation of META tags and other search engine basics can be found at http://www.mrfire.com/cgi-bin/a .cgi?searchengines

## STEP THREE - KEI Analysis? Go As Low As You Can Go!

Once you have placed a good amount of keywords in your basket, go onto final step: KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) Analysis. For now, all you need to know is that a keyword's KEI is based on a simple competition versus popularity ratio.

* For a detailed explanation of this, go to http://www.wordtracker.com/help/keihelp.html.

When choosing poor keywords, you should always shoot for a KEI of 0-30. Anything above that might give you a shot at a decent search engine ranking, and since your main goal here is to choose worst keywords possible, you'll definitely want to stay within these boundaries.

LESSON TO BE LEARNED: Don't settle for a KEI of less than 100. Typically, I will not even attempt optimizing a keyword that has a KEI of less than 200, simply because I know it will save a lot of time if best keyword is chosen right off bat.

I've made mistake of choosing wrong keywords to focus on more than once. The result was an enormous amount of wasted time and energy, and was overall an extremely frustrating experience.

Until I discovered there was a service that could actually count number of requests and competition for each keyword, I was playing Pin The Tail On The SEO Donkey. Don't make same mistake that I, and thousands of others have made over years.

Do research before optimizing your page for search engines, and you will reap great rewards.

The results tell me there are only 3 competitors bidding on this term at $0.06, $0.05, $0.05. So, to get a top 3 place as cheap as possible I need to bid $0.06 to get 2nd place, as a $0.05 bid would place me 4th.

Do this for all your search times, listing ones you can get cheaply. You'll find some will be very expensive. The price you bid is what you pay for every click through, so don't get carried away. The minimum bid is $0.05.

Step 3 - Make your bids

First visit account set-up page at:

https://signup.goto.com/s/dtc/signup/

Complete a separate section of form for every search term you're bidding for. You'll need to list search term, title of entry, description of entry, page URL, and bid.

Try to include search term in both title and description and you'll get a much better response. There are full instructions on page.

You pay a minimum monthly fee of $20, whether you receive $20 of clickthroughs or not. So make sure you bid on enough terms. You'll hear back from Goto.com in about 5 days whether or not each bid has been accepted.

You need to check back from time to time to make sure no one has outbid you, in which case you need to decide whether to up bid. You also receive a monthly traffic report by email listing hits on each keyword.

That's basically all there is to it. Remember to be creative with your search terms. For example, a term containing "online" may be out of your price bracket, but one containing "on line" may not.

Be successful!