Now that you have researched your keywords and have a nice long list, it is time to optimize the pages of your website.  You want to optimize each page for up to 5 keywords.  I use HubSpot’s Keyword Grader to keep me on track to use keywords that have a good number of monthly searches and are not so competitive that I will never have a shot at ranking well.  For some of your interior pages, a long tail keyword strategy will work well to reach a targeted audience (but that is a post for another day).

I recommend making a list of each page on your site and then choosing what keywords you are going to optimize for on each.  Using a spreadsheet will help you keep track of all the changes you need to make.  Here is a list of all of the columns I would create:

• Page Description (optional) – this is only for you to describe the page you are optimizing
• Existing URL – the current URL
• New URL – Here is your first opportunity to tell the search engine the most important keywords.  company.com/productname is not as powerful as company.com/your-keyword-here.  Dashes help the search engine know when to break the words up.  Note: if your product name is something that is searched often then you may want to leave it in the URL but for most SMB’s this is not the case.  Be sure to keep it short, this is definitely not the place to keyword stuff.
• Page Title – This is the text that appears in the (typically) blue bar of your browser window (and in the tab for that page).  Here is another place to add keywords rather than just list your company anme and products.  Keep in mind, the fewer the keywords the more strength each has and Google gives more weight to the first keywords than to the last.  Also, remember that humans will be reading these too.This is also the bold text that appears on the search engine results page.  Make it compelling to click on and unique for each page on your site.
• <h1> tag – These will show up on the page as your heading but in the html need to be properly tagged as <h1>.  Again the fewer the words, the more weight each receives.  Use target keywords to tell the search engines and humans what the page is about.
• Meta Keywords – these are not seen on the web page itself, only in the html.  You can list 8-10 keywords separated by commas.You may consider including your target keywords plus common misspellings of those keywords.  Meta keywords are not of much importance to Google but are more important for Yahoo and Ask. I find this is also a good place to keep track of the keywords I want to use as I update the content on the page.
• Meta Description – This is a 1-2 sentence description of the content present on the page.It is also hidden on the page and only seen in the html.  However, this is the description under the page title used in search engine results.  Be sure to include target keywords because the keywords searched on will be bolded in the description.  There is a 150 character limit on what the search engines will show.

I cannot makes changes to my site on my own, so my web developer was extremely grateful that I had laid out all of my changes in a spreadsheet.  It really helped him as we redesigned the entire site.  You can also implement these strategies as small changes one by one especially if you have a content management system at your fingertips.  Be sure to resubmit your sitemap to Google as you may changes so it knows to crawl your site.

Special thanks to Karen Rubin at HubSpot for helping me with my own website optimization.  It goes live next week!