By Maverick Steffen | Daily Marketing Advice

Search Engine Optimization is the art of getting your website ranked on search engines for high value keywords that are being searched by your target market. Today I'm going to teach you how to create and use keywords on your website to drive more revenue.

What is a Keyword

Quite simply, a keyword is to SEO as a telephone is to sales calls. A keyword is one or more words in sequence that are primarily used to retrieve information on web search engines. The following are examples of keywords:

• Nebraska
• Funny dogs
• Stuffed potatoes

Long tail keywords are keywords that include at least 3 words, and can include as many as ten words (for instance, people trying to figure out the name of a song by searching the lyrics). Here are a few examples of long tail keywords:

• “How to get women to like me”
• “how to prevent creepy guys from hitting on me”
• “How to Date a girl that is obviously ignoring me”
• “how to file A Restraining order”
• “Best restraining order defense lawyers”

Now, because you’re a law firm, none of those keywords would be useful to your business.

Creating Your Keywords

If you’re a local business with a defined geographical scope, your locations must be in each respective keyword. Also, you want to always ensure each of your keywords includes your specific services/products. For example:

• Burlington County commercial plumber
• Rhode Island Business Consultant
• Las Vegas school architect

However, if you’re a National company, you don’t need to optimize for specific location. Although, it would be really useful to do so in a blog posting if you have specific issues you would be targeting.

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Next, you’re going to create a long list of keywords for your website, while covering all of your various product/service combinations. This is easy because you’re going to visit mergewords.

All you will need to do here is type the various locations you service on each line (refer to your areas Wikipedia page) of the first box, and then, the various products and services you sell in the second. All you need do know is hit the big button, and then copy those keywords out and put them into an excel sheet where you can keep track of where those keywords are ranking on a monthly basis.

Optimizing Your Site for Your New Keywords

Next, you’ll want to decide which keywords are the most profitable. This will most likely be an ongoing process of trial and error, but usually the best place to start is by asking yourself two questions:

• Which area has the most clients
• Which products/service are going to be sought out by the most amount of people.

So say you’re a commercial plumber in South Jersey, and you decided that Cherry Hill, NJ has the largest amount of business clients. You then realize that the majority of clients come to your for trenchless repair. You would then optimize your homepage for the following keyword:

“Trenchless Repair in Cherry Hill, NJ.”

Always put your top two profitable keywords on your homepage as that is the page on your site that will naturally get ranked higher than any other page on your site. This is because people (directories, media, bloggers, customers, etc.) will usually always link to your homepage, and external links are one of the best ways to get ranked higher on Google, but we’ll talk about that later.

Now, select a list of keywords for every page on your site. While your homepage can handle 2-3 keywords, every other page on your site can only handle one per page. So, if you have 10 pages, that’s 11 keywords. Remember that the point of all of this is to be found by your target market when they are searching for keywords related to your business. So, next we want to tell search engines what each page on your site is about. The trick to that is going to be following my formula. So we’re going to post your keyword in the:

• Once in the Title Tag
• Once in an H1
• Once in the Alt and Title tag of a page image
• Once in the content

When integrating a keyword into your content, try to make it feel as natural as possible. For example:

"While searching for a trenchless repair in Cherry Hill, NJ is not always an easy task, we’re here to minimize your fears and maximize your trust in us with a free inspection and estimate."

Now, the real trick to SEO these days is synonyms. And so you want to include a few synonyms of your keyword into your content as well. Ensure you use this formula for every page on your site.

I hope you enjoyed this posting on how to create and use keywords in your website. Good luck to you, and let us know if you need any help.