Find a set of keywords that 's really hot. Thousands of people are searching on them. BUT - to save your life you can't get your site to place in the top 10. You can't just find a hot set of keywords. You have to find a 'niche'. The ratio between the number of searches conducted and the number of Websites that qualify to be in position for the keywords is important. You want keywords where the number of searches is high but the number of Websites that meet those keywords is low. That's not easy to do. In fact, often when you do find them it's not months before half a million sites (whose owners found them too) suddenly appear, filling the search results.

Even if you find a 'hot' set of keywords where the ratio of searches to the number of qualifying Websites is good, you still may very well not conduct much business. In fact, of all the searches that are conducted on the Internet, far less than 10% directly result in a sale. But - the operative word here is 'directly'. Consumer analysts are learning that even though searches may not 'directly' result in a sale, often, they do end up helping consumers decide what to buy, for how much and where. Yahoo and comScore recently conducted a study of searches involving the automotive industry. In the three month span of the study, 716 million Website visits involved some query for information about automobiles.