Put your keywords in prominent places in your tags, links, and body

Previous page: Do choose keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your business and that people are actually looking for.

2. Do put those keywords in your page titles, meta tags, headers, links and body text

Once you have narrowed down your list of keywords, you need to optimize your pages for those terms. This means adding your keywords to several places on your pages so that search engines will see that this is what your page is about. One of the most important places to add them is to your page’s titles. Start the title with the keywords, since the prominence of these words is important; if necessary you can add the name of your company toward the end of the title. The title shouldn’t be long strings of keywords, though; somewhere between 6 and 10 words seems to be the average.

If you open your page in a web browser and select View, then Source, your Title tag will be at the top of the page, in the <head> section, and it will look something like this:

<title>Your Business Keywords Here and Here</title>

You should also add the keywords to your description and keywords meta tags. The importance of these tags reached mythical proportions in recent years and is still dying a slow death. While few search engines weigh these tags heavily (if at all) when determining your site’s rank, they are still worth adding to your pages. Many engines will use the description tag content to describe your page’s content under its link in the search results; this description is what encourages a customer to click your link instead of someone else’s, so it’s important to spend some time on this. The keywords area is not really used at the moment, but engines change frequently and it can’t hurt to have your relevant keywords listed here in case this tag becomes a factor again.

Your description and keyword tags will also be in the head section of your page's source and should look like this (some people separate keywords with commas, some don't):

The headers of your pages are another area to add keywords. This text appears within <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, etc. tags, which appear larger and bolder on the page than your copy. There is some indication that words typed in larger text or using bold typeface will be considered more important than “normal” type, so also consider making some of the keywords bold or larger than the surrounding text. The link text of your pages should also include your keywords; particularly backlinks (links to your site from other sites) and links to other pages within your site should include the keywords most relevant to the page being linked to (see “Do #10 for hints on backlink keywords).

Finally, include your keywords in the body of the page. Try to put them near the beginning of the body text; some search engines will use the first few lines of the page as the link’s description in search results (rather than using your description tag content), so use your keywords and describe the contents of your page for a potential customer. Search engines are also looking for the prominence of certain words: placing keywords at the beginning of the body text makes them more prominent which implies their importance. The engines may also be looking for keywords to be repeated lower down the page, toward the center of the body as well as near the end of the page. Mentioning a term several times establishes to the engine that your page is truly about that subject. Be careful not to overdo it, though; once in a few of the tags and links and a few times in the body should be just right.

The body text of your page's source comes right after the </head>, and will sit between these tags:

<body>Here's the text of my page.</body>

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Next: 3. Do remember that Content is King: include substantial content at your site.