There’s no doubt about it. The key to online prominence lies in mastering the art of finding the right keywords.

Keywords are the specific words that internet users type in the search engine fields to find the information they need. If your website contains these exact keywords, in their proper density level, you’d have a great chance of appearing in a good position on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Whether you’re selling your own products, or promoting your affiliate links, or inviting people to subscribe to a membership program you have developed, you would need a website to carry out your marketing approach, and you will need visitors to come to your website to experience the success that its potentials promise. And the key to generating a lot of visitors for your website lies in the selection of the correct keywords.

Keywords take on a more important role when it comes to online endeavors enrolled with Pay Per Click (PPC) programs. Keywords would attract the ads that the PPC programs can assign, and once your visitors would click on such ads, you will earn a specified amount. There are some ads that pay a measly $0.05 per click. But there are also some ads that pay as much as $50.00 per click. How can you secure for yourself the latter option? Well, you must be able to determine the most profitable keywords beforehand.

Finding profitable keywords isn’t really difficult, for as long as you know what you’re doing. There are three ways by which you could accomplish this.

1. Create an AdWords account. AdWords is Google’s service for PPC advertisers. Creating an account won’t cost a single cent, but it would give you access to a control panel where you could view the bidding for certain keywords. All you have to do is to find keywords that command very high bids. This would give you an idea about how much the CPC of those keywords could be. Interested with this approach? Visit http://www.google.com/adwords/ today.

2. A number of online marketers offer keyword lists of the hottest topics today. These are subjects that have little competition, and which can be profitably exploited for your AdSense PPC campaigns. Often, these lists come with reports detailing the expected CPC of each of the keywords in the said lists. The online marketers who distribute the same would require a fee, of course, but if you have made content sites the engine of your online enterprise, these keyword lists could prove valuable for your endeavors.

3. Use a tool such as Market Samurai.  Market Samurai will help you find those gold nugget opportunities that exist in your marketplace. Plus it’s going to help you avoid dead end projects before you even begin.

There are three basic components to a successful PPC campaign. These are your website’s page impressions, or the number of unique visitors who get to load up your pages; your website’s Click Through Rate (CTR), or the number of visitors who get to click on the ads displayed on your website; and your ads’ CPC. The right keywords would attract ads with high CPC, and you’ll be able to solve 1/3 of the equation. The other 2/3? This is where marketing strategies would come in.