Give “Hints” to the Search Engines
You’ve probably heard the expression, “Content is king.” No truer words were ever spoken. If you want prominent placement on search engines, you’ll need to have copy that gives the search engines lots of clues as to what it’s about. These so-called “hints” are keywords or key phrases.

Search engines need words to discern the content of your website and to index it correctly in their directories. While the Internet certainly has plenty of graphics, the search engines look only at text. You need to use actual, visible copy on all the pages of your site that you want indexed and ranked.

Choose Good Keywords
Next, your text must include the right words. Target the right keywords or all your efforts could be in vain. Think of the keywords you associate with your business. Then brainstorm what words your customers likely associate with your business. Look at competitor sites and see what words they use. Finally, use software like WordTracker at www.wordtracker.com to find additional terms if necessary.

The important thing is to come up with good, relevant keywords. That is, search engines aren’t going to give a good rank to your web site about wedding gowns if your site mostly talks about romance and “your special day.” If you sell wedding gowns, make sure your site copy uses the words “wedding gowns” at every possible opportunity.

Look for Niches
Next, look for niches that allow you to target specific keywords within your copy and meet the relevancy guidelines for logical search queries. Going back to the wedding gown example, if you sell special dresses for brides getting married for the second time, then set up a special page called, “Wedding Gowns for Second Marriages.” Or if you create your own gowns, set up a page called, “Custom Designed Wedding Gowns.”

It sounds so obvious, but there are plenty of websites selling particular items that don’t make reference to those items in their body copy. Flash movies or fancy all-graphic or all-photo pages don’t tell a search engine about your business. Therefore, these sites never get considered as relevant matches for search queries.

Integrate Keywords into Text
Once you’ve brainstormed and researched keywords for your site, the next task is to integrate those keywords into your copy. The trick is to do this subtly so as not to distract or turn off your reader. Keep sentences concise and easy to understand, taking advantage of every opportunity to work in those keywords.

Just in case, you’re thinking of trying to outsmart the search engines, you should know that they won’t look kindly upon your site if they sense that you’re “jamming” keywords into sentences where they don’t belong, or putting them in places like comment tags and image ALT tags where the keywords have nothing to do with the specific image.