You may know the story: you work hard to build great content to sell a great product, and then on top of that slave away to get the page to the top of the search results in Google. You jump for joy as you see your number one ranking, and then sit back and wait for the visitors to come and the money to roll in. The visitors do come, but the money just trickles, or doesn’t come at all…

Why does this happen? Why is it that you can have a great ranking but make no money from the traffic? It’s because not all keywords are created equal.

You see, sometimes people are just looking for information, not to buy. If you target keywords that are informational in nature, rather than commercial in nature, it’s unlikely that you’ll profit much from those keywords — at least not from direct sales.

That’s why, before you choose which keywords to do the ranking work for, you need to find out whether or not those keywords have strong “commercial intent.” Commercial intent is basically this: what percentage of people typing in those keywords are looking to buy (or not buy)?

To find out the commercial intent for any given set of keywords, go to MSN AdLabs’ Commercial Intent tool. There you can enter the keywords you’re thinking about ranking for and see whether or not people searching for those keywords are buyers. If a large percentage are buyers, go for it. If not, you may want to look elsewhere.

The author of this article runs a panasonic rice cookers web site, which also offers products and information about black and decker rice cooker and cuisinart rice cooker.