Whether you are starting with a new site or you already have an existing one, you need to spend a little time on choosing the keywords that you want your site to be found with.

Keywords are the terms that people will type into a search engine to find your product or service.

Spend some time and consider what someone looking for your product or service might type into a search engine to find you. Maybe ask some friends what they would type into find your service etc.

Unfortunately if you don't have these keywords/terms actually in your website, you have no chance of coming up high in search results for them. Search engines like relevant content. If you don't have content relevant to the search term (keyword) used, your site won't come up in the search engines results.

Where should you put your keywords on your website? I'll tell you

Before I do though a word of warning - don't just list keywords and terms over and over throughout your website - you'll get banned from search engines for what's known as spamming. You need to be clever and not over do it.

Firstly add a keyword or two in your meta title tag

Rather than just titling your main page home, or the name of your company etc put a couple of keywords in there. For example - if your website sells handmade candles, you might use "Quality handmade candles" do get the idea?

Then in the meta keyword tag

List your chosen keywords here. Just separate them by a comma. Pick between three and ten keywords depending on the size of your website and the amount of different products/services you offer.

Then put some in the meta description tag

This is often the text that comes up below your websites title in search engine results. Write a short sentence about your site and include a few keywords. For example - Back to the handmade candles again. If the candle company was based in the UK you might write something like this.

"UK based handmade candle company specialising in traditional UK styles. Check out our online shop for special offers, and to view our candle designs and prices"

Try and fit keywords into you website internal links

Make sure your linking text includes some keywords. So rather than having a link that says "products designs", you might call it "candle designs" etc.

Try and do as many links as possible in this way. Obviously only use relevant keywords for the page that is displays..

Use heading tags and include keywords here

Much the same as the links really - try and include keywords in the heading that are relevant to the text below it. So rather than having a section headed "design", you could call it "candle designs". Search engines scan heading tags like you and I scan newspaper headings. Do you get the idea?

Use them in your written text

Don't over do it here - just write quality relevant content and sprinkle in the keywords and terms. As with all of this sections, when you look for the opportunity to include some keywords you can usually see where you can slightly alter something and fit one in.

It's all about peppering your keywords in and taking advantage of an opportunity that your competition might miss. Look for the opportunities to improve the keyword content.

Do this to every page

This is where many people fall down. They just change their home/main page. If you do this you are missing the benefits of individually optimising each page with different relevant keywords and titles etc etc.

Bottom line - would you rather have one page in the top ten of Google for one keyword, or would you rather have ten pages all coming up for different keywords relevant to each individual pageThe more pages ranked well the better.