What are benefits of becoming a freelance professional? Freelance allows considerable freedom in how a person goes about his or her life. That applies to when you start working, how long you work and when you can stop working. If you like to sleep all day, it is conceivable that you could be doing data entry or writing an article in middle of night. It might be necessary to make phone calls when rest of world is awake, but otherwise, it is completely flexible.

Step 1: Open your text editor or word processor and write down all words and phrases that you might have searched for if you were looking for a company which offers products and services similar to yours. For example, suppose your company organizes packaged tours to Australia. Here's a list of phrases that I might have searched for if I were planning to make a trip to Australia:

tourism in Australia travel to Australia travelling in Australia travel agencies in Australia travelling agencies in Australia Australian travel agencies

Of course, keywords that came to your mind may have been different. But that's not important - important thing is to get an initial list of keywords.

You may be wondering why I have not used single word keywords. Here's why:

Firstly, single word keywords tend to be hyper-competitive. A search for "tourism" or "travelling" in any search engine will probably generate hundreds of thousands of pages. While it is possible that you may get your page in top 10 for such a single word keyword, it is quite unlikely.

Secondly, because of sheer number of pages that single word searches can throw up, most search engine users have realized that they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases rather than individual words. Statistical research has shown that most people are now searching for 2 or 3 word phrases rather than for single words.

Thirdly, single word keywords won't get you targeted traffic. When people search for "tourism", they are not necessarily looking for tourist destinations in Australia - they may be interested in any other country of world. Even if you got your site into top 10 for tourism, you gain nothing from such visitors. However, when someone searches for "tourism in Australia", he/she is your potential customer, and hence, it makes sense for you to try and get a top ranking for your site for that keyword. Hence, whenever you are trying to generate keywords, try to be location specific. Try to think of keywords which apply to geographic area that your product or service is designed to serve.

Step 2: Open any spreadsheet program that is installed in your hard drive. I assume you are using Microsoft Excel. If you are using some other spreadsheet program, just change spreadsheet related procedures outlined here to fit your program.

Create 4 columns - one for keyword, one for popularity of keyword, one for number of sites that appear in AltaVista for that keyword and last for something I call Keyword Effectiveness Index (don't worry - I'll explain what KEI means later on). In order to ensure that you can follow what I am saying, I recommend that you add following column headers to first four columns of first row of your spreadsheet:

Keyword Popularity No. of Competitors KEI

In case you don't want to take trouble of creating your own spreadsheet, download keywords.zip file from http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?4901&download.htm The file contains a sample spreadsheet in Excel 97 format.

Step 3: A great way to obtain a list of keywords related to ones you have developed in first step is to use WordTracker's keyword generation service by going to http://the-easy-way.com/wordtracker.html Click on "Trial" option at top of site. In page that appears, type in your name and email address and click on "Start trial >>" button. In next page, click on "Click here to start trial". In next page, type in first keyword that you developed in Step 1, i.e. "tourism in Australia", in text box. Click on "Proceed >>" button.