Several years ago I can recall when search engines lacked the ability to provide us with good quality results, but that has certainly changed. During the past few years search engines have dramatically enhanced their search capabilities, accuracy, speed and functionality. The top three search engines to date are Google, Yahoo and Bing (previously known as MSN/Live) which serve millions of searches every month on an unlimited number of subjects.

As a website or business owner, it’s in your best interest to carefully target your website with keywords that will help get you ranked high on these (and other) search engines. But how do you do this without the expertise? It can be somewhat time consuming but a modest attempt can do enough to make a difference in your search engine ranking.

To help you, I’d like to stress the following key points:

• Break down your website so you have each page targeting up to 3 related keywords. For example, if you have a page that is selling writing services, you can target copy writing, copy editing and website copy.
• In the website code, your ‘keywords’ meta data should list the same keywords you are targeting in your page. In the above example, copy writing, copy editing and website copy would be the keywords. There is no need to use more than 5 keywords here.
• Try to use the keywords (at LEAST one of them) in the <title> of the page. Again, this would be in the code as well.
• The meta description should use the keywords, all of them if possible. The keywords will show up as bold text in the results when someone does a search.
• Use internal links (to other pages on YOUR website) to related content/pages.

Those are basic necessities to using your website keywords properly for SEO purposes. You should also do some simple research to find out who your competition is for the keywords. Simply go to the three above listed search engines and perform searches for the keywords you want to target. You can see what they do on their website which may be helping to keep their rankings high. Additionally, you must realize that your website will not have an immediate effect to searches so give it a week or two to get indexed.

Update: Please read this update regarding choosing meta keywords