Creating keyword-aware content

It may seem unnatural to focus on a keyword when writing content for your website, but it is absolutely essential for writing your pages in a manner that will get them ranked highly in the search engines. Note that, the title of this chapter includes the phrase keyword-aware, rather than keyword-rich. Too many inexperienced webmasters, once they discover the magic effect of including keywords in their content, go overboard with keywords. You need not bludgeon the search engines by mindless repeating keywords in singular and plural, and every synonym in between. Google is very sophisticated. A light touch will work best: write content naturally with a few mentions of keywords, and Google will get the message.

That said, no matter how well-written your content is, if it doesn't contain the keywords and phrases that people use to search for your product or service, your pages are unlikely to show up in the search engine results pages.

For this reason, the first...