Its true!

"Don't try to create search engine traffic. Stand in front of the lane where traffic is."

When you are thinking of creating a new product or developing a website, you should first find out what is it that people are looking for.

Two things are very important for you to succeed.

• The product or site should relate to something you love. You can create a successful site on horses only if you love horses.

• You have to locate what topic related to your subject is in heavy demand. Is it care and upkeep of horses or horse racing?

If you do not identify a niche market and become an expert in that subject, you will have a tough time succeeding in your venture.

Locating your niche area has become easier than ever
There are several tools that help you to locate variations of your basic theme and then report the demand, supply and profitability of these keywords, based on the search engine traffic. But first, some basics --

Keyword Demand
The amount of search engine traffic your selected keyword is having. The more, the better. This will differ from search engine to search engine.

Keyword Supply
The number of sites that come up when someone searches for the term. Obviously, the fewer, the better.

This is your competition. You will have to get a good rank in these search engine result pages (SERP). You have a greater chance of getting a good rank and possibly hits to your sites when there is lower competition.

Keyword Potential
The potential of the keyword you are targeting is the ratio of the demand vs. the supply. If the demand goes up, potential goes up; if the supply goes up, potential goes down.

However, there is a twist here.

Which is a better keyword? One with demand and supply of 100 each or one with demand and supply of 1000 each. Naturally the later.

So what we do is - to build this factor in our calculations, we put

potential = (demand x demand) / supply

This reports the potential of the second keyword as being higher - which it is.

You must note here that the actual figure for potential is not important. Its main use is to rank the keywords we are planning to target and identify, which are the ones we will go for first.

What do you do with these keywords, once you have identified your high potential keywords? We will be covering this topic in the second part of this article - "Keyword Rich Content Pages - Climb Up the Search Engine Ladder".