Keywords are what help your site get recognized by Internet search engines, and as a result, help would-be customers find your Internet presence. There are many strategies that can be employed to ensure the likelihood of your website coming up in Keyword searches:

Use a keyword tool to help you find the most targeted keywords for your site.

Pick themes or keyword baskets around which you can optimize the various sections of your site.

Targeting Keyword Phrases is a much better idea than trying to target individual words. Keyword phrases tend to be easier to rank well for AND they typically convert far better than individual words.

Target different keyword phrases on each page.

Target no more than one or two primary and two or three secondary keyword phrases per page.

If you generate hundreds (or even thousands) of pages of content, make sure they read well and have unique content. Over time, if people cite your content, your page will start to rank for many different terms as long as it is unique and targeted around a theme.

Analytics

It helps to install a free or cheap analytics program like Google Analytics or HaveAMint.com before you start marketing so you can see what keywords you rank for. It is easier to rank for related keywords than to rank for entirely new keywords.

You can also use pay per click marketing on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft right off the start to learn what keywords convert well for you and which keywords do not.

Page Optimization

Page optimization is the process of making sure that your website functions in the most effective way possible in relation to search engines. The following are steps you can take to optimize your page:

Use your keywords in your page title. Place the most important keyword phrase close to the beginning of the page title. Do not put your site title on every page of your site unless you are really trying to brand that name. In that scenario, it still is usually best to place the site name at the end of the page titles.

Shorter site titles are usually better than really long ones.

Sometimes I overlap related keyword phrases in the page title. Overlapping keyword phrases in the page title can help you pick up multiple search phrases. For example, professional search engine marketing services helps me obtain good rankings for (1) search engine marketing, (2) professional search engine marketing, (3) search engine marketing services, and (4) professional search engine marketing services.

Meta tags are not extremely important, but they can help some. The meta description should be a sentence to a paragraph describing the page contents. The meta description tag can be seen in some search results, so you want to write it for human eyes and for it be compelling.

The meta keywords tag is probably not worth the time to make, but if you do make one, it should contain your primary keyword and its common misspellings and synonyms. Each keyword phrase in the keywords tag should be comma separated.

Use a single, descriptive H1 header on your page containing the keyword phrases similar to those you targeted in the page title. This helps reinforce the page title.

Use descriptive subheaders (H2 or H3) before every paragraph or every few paragraphs. This improves usability and helps define what the page is about to search engines without making the page look like it was written for a search engine.

Use bulleted lists and bolding to break up content and make it easier to read.

Write your content for human consumption. If you write exclusively for search engines, the pages will read poorly and nobody will want to look at them.