Keyword and SERP Help Please

[Berner]

So I am curious about keyword placements etc.

My main question is:

So is whatever you search for in say Google must be the same in a website - to be found?

So say you search for plumbers in Colorado

Then you must have that exact, same phrase, in your website to be found?

or does Google know based on title tags and such that a page is about plumbers and they service Colorado?

I just want to make sure I am understanding how keywords work to be found.

I mean you can have Colorado plumbers and plumbers in Colorado. So its hard to figure out how to use keywords.

So a brief suggestion is greatly appreciated

Chris

[khi5]

If your site is new(er) and / or simply does not have much trust from search engines yet (do not rank well) I would strongly encourage you to use similar keywords on page as long as it does not compromise user experience. Ideally also get those keywords in your H1. As your site becomes more trusted you can get away with more (less keywords on page) and still rank. It sounds like you may have a site where I would not recommend such approach yet.

[KeriMorgret]

Today's search engines are fairly smart, and use a variety of signals to determine what a website is about. Just the other day, I was searching on Bing for Angry Birds Space JPL, as I was curious to see if Pasadena's Jet Propulsion laboratory had anything to say about the accuracy of the orbits in Angry Birds. Bing returned results that had JPL, but also highlighted (in the snippets in the SERPs) results with NASA.

Write naturally, and write for your reader. Would it sound really weird if you said out loud what you want to write on your page? The search engines can figure out related things fairly well and don't need it in quite such an exact order.

The sections of the Beginner's Guide http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo on How Search Engines Operate and Keyword Research should also be helpful to you.