I guess no one knows how to do this. I have searched this site for the answer and haven't come up with anything. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Usual case: the banner is a graphic file (gif, jpg, png); the links are in the containing html mark-up, not embedded in the graphic file itself. The keywords are in the alt attribute, again not in the graphic.

Possible alternative: the banner is a Flash movie. Links can be embedded, and keyword rich text, too. But search engines will not take account of elements within a Flash movie in their scoring algorithms.

i think i am going to hire someone to do this for me. can anyone recommend someone or email me? how much do you think i should pay someone for this? thanks for your help

I am not sure about kwds ( but if I got your question right ) to have links within an image you can try something like this

...
<IMG SRC="pic1.gif" USEMAP="#map1">

<MAP NAME="map1">

<AREA SHAPE="RECT" COORDS="0,0,10,20" HREF="http://www.example.com">

</MAP>
...

so when someone clicks on the area of the image defined by the rectangle shape they would go to example.com

Areas on the image can be defined using rectangle, circle or polygon

For more info see W3C's Objects, Images, and Applets [w3.org] doc.

HTH