What I'm about to discuss may seem like common sense basics to many, but it is amazing how many clients I come across who really have no idea what to do. As mentioned, it all starts with doing your keyword research to uncover the words and phrases that your customers are searching for in the search engines which are relevant to your product or service. Think about what it is you provide and what your customers or clients want. As a quick example, if you sell office furniture, "buy office furniture" would be a highly relevant keyword phrase for your business. Once you have completed this all-important research and understand which pages on your site you want to optimize each keyword phrase for, it's then time to use them!

Placing keywords effectively on your page is a matter of knowing the places where keywords can and should be used. Without getting into too much detail, a couple of places where you should place your targeted keywords are (this is by no means an exhaustive list):

• page titles (<title>) which are visible to the user in the bar at the top of their browser (blue in IE and Mozillla Firefox)
• meta descriptions (the snippets of text you see under the clickable title in search results pages)
• anchor text links in your site navigation and within the copy on other pages of your site
• headers (<h1>, etc., when possible

Of course you also want to use your keywords in the visible body copy on the page. This, along with page titles, is perhaps the most important when it comes to on-page optimization. Off-page optimization, like getting links with your targeted keywords from other websites, also plays an extremely large role in your overall optimization efforts … but that's a topic for another day. 

The goal here when it comes to using your chosen keywords in the visible body copy of the page is to work them into your copy smoothly and naturally. Many people out there like to "stuff" their copy with their chosen keywords, using them over and over again to the point that the reader is almost gagging on them. While sounding awful to a visitor on your site, the search engines also pick up on this gross misuse, as they are fairly keen to these types of ruthless tactics these days. While the engines may simply ignore your efforts at best, at worst they may actually penalize your site, detecting your attempts to manipulate their search results. They may even categorize your pages as spam. Create your page copy for your users first, without the search engines in mind, while sprinkling in your keyword phrases naturally because humans are who will be buying or converting on your site, not search engines.

Remember, search engines want to return the best, most relevant results to their users. With this goal in mind they have become very smart at finding what is most useful to visitors. Turn your pages of content into meaningless drivel, AKA spam, by writing copy that uses your keyword phrase "buy cars" 50 times in a 75-word blurb of text (for example), and that's exactly how the search engines will treat them. Now you may be asking "Well Jesse, how many times SHOULD we be using our keywords on a given page?" Great question! I'll have an answer for you next time.