Many people are choosing telecommuting as an option to bring in an income while being at home. Whatever the reasons that we choose to work at home, the one thing we all have in common is the problem of locating legitimate jobs online. We often come online with the idea that finding a job online will be easy.

Unfortunately it's not usually that easy. What you will often run into are the scams for working at home. Why is that though? We often find the job search websites and plug in two common keywords. These two keywords are often the reason many of us give up on finding a legitimate job because all that pulls up are the scams.

The keywords I'm speaking of are:

• Work at home • Work from home

--> With the keywords "work at home," you're almost 100% guaranteed to pull up scams or business opportunities, and not the legitimate jobs. Now don't get me wrong, there can be legit jobs in these keywords. Iit takes much longer to find them, and it's much harder to locate them. In my 4 plus years of working at home, I've discovered lesser used keywords that yield me much better results.

Popular Keywords:

• Telecommuting • Telecommute • Telecommuter

--> These three keywords are second to "work at home" in their popularity. A pro of these keywords is that many leads will be listed with them. I find legitimate job leads using these keywords every time I search with them. I also find the scams, but overall these keywords are great to use with your job search.

7 More Keywords to Use

• Must have home office • 1099 • IC or independent contractor • Virtual office and virtual • Remote contractor • Off-site • Freelance

--> Next on the list are these 7 keywords. Next to telecommuting, these are my favorite. Often they will pull up legitimate jobs. You won't always find a good variety of leads all the time. Sometimes the deeper you dig, the better the jobs and the better your chance that hundreds of other people haven't found that same job.

Last 3 Keywords to Try

• Must have DSL • Home-based • Home-based employee

--> Last, I use these 3 keywords when finishing up my job search. I don't always find leads with these keywords on every job search site I go to, but the more job search sites you go to, the better your chance you'll find leads with all these keywords. You can find a list of over 25 job search sites at www.mommysplace.net/work_at_home_job_sites.html

Basically, the more keywords you use and the more job sites you go to, the better your chance at locating legitimate job leads. Even if it takes you a few hours a week to do your searching, with all the keywords and job search sites, it's worth it in the end if you land a job!

Another thing to keep in mind for speeding up the job search is to know what a scam looks like so you can avoid it. I've gotten to the point where I can usually just read the title of the "job" and know right away it's a scam. If I do click in a job lead, within a few seconds I can determine if it's a scam or sketchy. I wasn't able to do that when I first started out in the telecommuting field, though. In my time of being scammed and reading others being scammed, I discovered the common scams and the common red flags. Read more about scams, red flags, and links to research scams at www.mommysplace.net/work_at_home_scams.html

In closing, I'd like to say that using these keywords is a good start. When you find legitimate jobs, really search through the description and see what keywords they use. When you find a new keyword, jot that down and add it to your keyword list. The more keywords you use, the better your chance of finding and landing a legitimate job!

Happy Job Hunting!

Nell Taliercio is the owner of http://www.mommysplace.net; a leading resource website and community for work at home moms.