Once you have carefully selected your key words and phrases for your website, you now have to tune the website to match them. You need to carefully place these words and phrases into your website content, particularly in the non-visible areas, for example the various tags which help define what your site is about. Search engines take note of all these tags to help them decide where your site will be indexed. Links are particularly useful here, and people often get them badly wrong. If you use, for example, for more information about search engine optimisation click here, you risk being indexed for the 'click here' phrase and you will be competing with millions of others! The format you should use is 'for more information about search engine optimisation, click here.

There are also a number of other tags which should be used correctly to ensure that the search engines correctly index your website.

Experts differ on the quantity, but I believe that you should have at least five hundred words on a page for Google to recognise it as a valuable page and index it correctly. You also have to place the keywords and phrases in as natural way as possible within the document to make it relevant, the search engines frown on what they call keyword stuffing. If the opening sentence of your website is “widgets, widgets, widgets”, they will know that you are trying to fool them, you should sprinkle your keywords around the document in as natural a way as possible. Your should also use bold text and title tags in your document to emphasise the key words and phrases. It is also important to match the tags on your web page with the content, for example if you use 'widgets' in your tags, you should also use 'widgets' in your content.

Writing website content from the point of view of search engine optimisation is one of the most difficult aspects of search engine optimisation – many customers do not want their website home page cluttered up with too many words, but it is vital to get your website highly ranked in search engines.

Search engines do not like duplicate content – if you 'borrow' content from other sites, or use the same copy on multiple pages of your site, then Google will spot it. Google says that content must be 30% different to be valuable, how they measure it is anybodies guess, but never underestimate the power of Google! At the very least your content will be ignored, in the worst case your site will be downgraded because of duplicate content.

If in doubt, consult an SEO Expert!

The key to successful Search Engine Optimisation is the careful selection of key words and phrases for your website.

Using our tools, you will see two major parameters for your prospective key search phrases.

1. The competition for the search phrase, and
2. The monthly volume of search for the phrase

The higher the degree of competition for the search phrase, the harder it will be to be well ranked for it. For highly competitive search phrases, for example "car insurance", there are more than a hundred million search results. It would take many months and thousands of pounds a month to get anywhere near the top for this search term. However, there are search terms with just a few thousand competing pages where it would cost just a few hundred pounds and take a few months to get well listed.

The monthly search volume will show you how many people are searching for your particular key phrase, which will give you a good idea of the potential business available.

A good technique is to choose a mixture of hard keywords with a potential high return and easy keywords with a lower potential return, so that you get some business from your website soon as possible, with the potential for longer term growth.

• unless you are B2B, avoid industry jargon.

• Don't use marketing speak, eg “The largest insurance brokerage in East Anglia” The only people searching for this term are people trying to sell you something. Ordinary people will be searching for “house insurance Ipswich”
• Jargon and Marketing speak can appear on your site, but they are not your key search terms.

• Geographical search terms are the hardest, should you use Sudbury, Suffolk or East Anglia? People may be looking for “Florists in Sudbury”, “BMW in Suffolk” or “Hotels in East Anglia"

• There are free tools - including Google's own - which can help you with key phrase selection, including telling you how many searches per month are made using the term and how much competition there is for the term.
• Get the list down to about half a dozen terms - probably a mixture of easy terms with a quick return and harder terms with a long term benefit.

How many key phrases should I use?

Initially at least, your home page is probably by far the most powerful page on your website - you should concentrate on a maximum of six key terms for this page.  These key search engine optimisation phrases should be related in some way, so that the search engines really understand what your site is about.

As deeper pages on your website become more important, you should select up to six search terms for each of these pages as well. There is little point on repeating the same phrases that you have used for other pages.

A content management system will help you use these keywords effectively in your website.