Websites often have three main types of pages built for visitors - article pages, main pages and homepages.

In the strategy outlines in "Creating Fat Affiliate Sites" (see resource box to get your free copy) these three types of page have very different functions:

a) articles - get traffic

b) main pages - sell affiliate products

c) homepage - helps direct your visitors to what they want on your site.

The keywords I would choose for each type of page meet different criteria.

Let's look at some real data, so I can better explain the differences in keyword choice for these types of pages. In this article we'll look at the main pages.

My keyword research was carried out on "golf clubs", and I found 1815 phrases at Wordtracker related to this niche.

There are various ways you could approach this site, but I think a good strategy would be to have main pages that target the popular manufacturers of golf clubs.

The articles could then be reviews of different golf clubs, help and tips on choosing golf clubs, even golfing tips would be relevant.

Let's consider the main pages first.

The technique I use to find the main pages is simple. Sort the phrases according to Count, with highest count at the top. 99.9% of the time, this allows you to quickly map out the main pages of your site.

Here is what the top results look like:

Count 24Hours Comp. Keyword

2958 899 3500000 golf clubs
969 295 289000 used golf clubs
752 229 34200 golf club components
688 209 664000 golf tips
681 207 283000 discount golf clubs
617 188 498000 golf swing
455 138 44400 golf club reviews
423 129 3600000 golf club
411 125 153000 callaway golf clubs
333 101 54800 golf club clones
301 92 43800 ping golf clubs
298 91 20300 clone golf clubs
284 86 89800 taylor made golf clubs
272 83 17700 golf club review
255 78 44800 cheap golf clubs
186 57 11000 free golf tips
184 56 13800 golf swing tips

Once you have ordered your keywords by count, go down the list, and select several phrases that "encompass" your niche.

In my example, I am looking for makes of golf clubs.

The 7th most searched for phrase is:

"golf club reviews" with 138 searches a day at Google. While it is not the make of a golf club (therefore not suitable as a main page of my site), it would make an excellent phrase to target for my homepage considering the types of articles I discussed writing earlier.

Here are the top makes that people are actually searching for (data is number of searches at Google every day, and competing pages):

125 153000 callaway golf clubs
92 43800 ping golf clubs
49 43600 cleveland golf clubs
39 22500 nike golf clubs
39 17700 cobra golf clubs
37 54800 adams golf clubs
33 32200 mizuno golf clubs
33 61400 wilson golf clubs

As you can see, these phrases have high competition.

Trying to compete for any of these terms is going to involve a lot of off-page optimization (months of work). That is the reason our strategy uses lower competition phrases in articles, to drive traffic to these pages.

We have easily identified the main pages of our Golf Club site. What we need to do next, is to write the main pages, pre-selling our visitors into loosening the strings on their wallets. However, to complicate things further, we need to theme each page so that the search engines are left in no doubt about the topic of our page. This themeing will help your page get found for a variety of phrases related to the main phrase.

Sounds complicated, doesn't it?