It's a well-known fact that identifying and using keywords and phrases on your website will help you rise in the search engine rankings when your prospects enter those terms online.

For instance, if you sell widgets, then you want to identify all the words and phrases associated with your product that your prospects might enter when shopping online, and make sure to include them within the content of your site. Words such as: widgets, blue widgets, exotic widgets, unique widgets, customized widgets, widget device and buy widgets online might all be good choices.

Back in the early days of the Internet, you could pretty much put keywords anywhere on a page and your page would rank for that term. It didn't even really matter what your page was about – it could have been about something completely unrelated to widgets and as long as your keywords were somewhere on that page, you'd rank for that keyword.

Imagine how frustrating it was for web users when they went searching for widgets, and all of these unrelated sites came up!

The goal of every search engine is relevance. If they can't provide relevant results so web users can quickly find what they're looking for, then people will find a new search engine. That's why search engines have become so much savvier about how they rank web pages – and why you must become savvy in order to rank well.

It's been a gradual migration on the part of the search engines to where we are today. The search engines look at content on your page and perform a contextual analysis to make sure what you say your page is about is really what it's about.

Along the way, they've gotten wise to a lot of "tricks" that people have tried to fool the search engines, such as:

• Putting strings of words together to increase keyword density (widgets, widgets, widgets).
• Listing keywords alone in bullet format, instead of putting them in a sentence:
  • Widgets
  • Blue Widgets
  • Unique Widgets
  • Customized Widgets
• Keyword stuffing – putting your keyword within sentences as often as you can get it in there, regardless of what it sounds like:
  • XYZ Company sells widgets. Widgets make great gifts for the widget lover in your family. Widgets come in many sizes and widgets also come in many colors. Widgets can be purchased individually or widgets can be purchased as a set of widgets in our widget pack.

The engines look at your content to determine whether it appears "natural" – would you write like that if you were writing an article to publish in a magazine? If not, if your text does not appear natural – the search engines'll penalize you and you won't rank well for your keywords as a result.

As the engines get more sophisticated, they reward sites that provide good content, written naturally, that benefit the reader and is relevant to what your site is about.

So how can you make sure each of your web pages contains your keywords in such a way that you get the most benefit?

Natural web pages have the following characteristics:

• They include keywords in your Title, Description and Keyword tags. These tell the search engines what your page should be about. Include them once in each tag. Include only keywords that are actually on your page – not a "Google wish list" of every word you'd like to rank for.
• They include keywords in your Heading (h1, h2) tags.
• They include keywords in the first sentence on your page:
  • At XYZ Company, we specialize in quality Widgets for Small Business owners.
• They include your keywords no more than once per paragraph:
  • We offer widgets in the following colors: red, blue and yellow. They can be customized to meet your needs and personalized with your company logo. When buying widgets, you want to make sure you are getting only the finest quality available. Notice the top-grade stainless steel we use to create all of our products.
• They avoid having the same sentence appear in multiple paragraphs.
• They avoid using keywords back-to-back:
  • Check out our widgets. Widgets come in many colors.
• They avoid having every paragraph begin with an identical word or phrase.

While there are "experts" who will tell you to strive for a certain percentage of keywords within your page – known as "keyword density," it's much better to aim for pages that are written naturally, that provide a real benefit to your reader and are relevant to the topic of your site.

Following these guidelines should help you achieve that, resulting in better rankings – and happier visitors to your site.