Many small business owners build their sites in templates like Go Daddy, Homestead or Microsoft Office Live. I work with business owners on those sites. I've noticed a few things relating to keyword use for small business owners to keep in mind when working these templates.

You may have heard a lot about keywords and how important they can be in having your site come up when your product or service are being searched for.

Keywords are simply words used to describe your business. Read below for a couple of tips on how to use keywords on your website- within content and within tags:

Within Content- You can discover popular keywords by using free keyword trackers. For example- If I look up copywriter, I see where it has only been searched for 42 times. However, writing has been searched for 896 times and internet 7055 times. So, Internet Writing may make more sense for me to use as my site's main description then copywriter.

Write down 10 to 15 keywords or phrases that work well for you and that appear in searches. Place them in your content naturally so they make up about 5 to 7% of your total word count. So, if you have about a 400 word home page sprinkle 20 to 30 keywords throughout the copy.

If you can, use your keywords within the page heading block and the space right below. Work them in as subheads over your content.

Avoid keyword stuffing. That means placing a large amount of repetitive keywords in annoying strings of sentences. It doesn't work and it makes your site look amateurish.

Consider your location as part of your keyword strategy. Many people use that in searches. For example- I might search for Chicago home remodelers instead of home remodelers if I was seeking home remodeling servicers in the Chicago area.

Within Tags- Go to your site's home page and right click in it. You'll see- view source. Click on that. You'll see a puddle of words and symbols. You're looking at the code behind your words. This is what search engines see.

From that, you'll want to find 3 bits of phrases- title, meta description and meta keywords. For example, for my site, the word title is bracketed by the less than and more than signs- then it says No Cliche Copy: Internet Writing- with the bracketed word title again.

What I've seen, especially on do it yourself website templates, are the words home page instead of relevant keywords bracketed by title. No one searches for home page so that doesn't help your site's search engine visibility.

Take a look at the words bracketed in the meta description and keywords tags. Make sure they're the words you want. In fact, I think it's a good idea to check this periodically and change your words if you're not getting the hits that you want on your site.

Since search engines search by page, do the right click, view source exercise for all of your pages.

And if you want to see what words your competitors use, right click and view source on their pages. A little espionage can help your business!