Domain Name – admittedly using a keyword or a combination of keywords in your domain name is not often an option, however, doing so on landing sites IS almost always an option.  More about this in a later post.  Suffice it to say for now that this can make a huge difference in how search engines rank your site.

Metatags – “Meta” information is simply user-defined data that is added to your site specifically for the search engines.  It is, for the most part, unseen by visitors to your site and should be crafted using keywords.  It’s important to mention, however, that not all search engines even use metatags in their ranking algorithms.  So it’s still valuable to include your keywords in your metatags, just know that certain search engines – Google especially – will ignore the data.

Site Title – This is the name that appears in top of your browser.  Often you’ll see website titles like “home” or “welcome” or some other name that lacks keywords.  Including a keyword or multiple keywords in your site title can make a big difference in your site rankings.

Anchor text of Links – For sake of simplicity, let’s divide the links on your website into 3 parts: the name of the link, the string of characters that says where the text goes, and the tool tip for the link (the anchor text).  The tool tip is text that shows up when you hover your mouse pointer over the link.   Make sure your anchor text includes your keywords

H1 & H2 Headers – These are the titles of your articles and or sub-articles.  Resist the urge to title the different articles on your site with catchy or nifty titles – unless they include your keywords.

Content – I talked about how keywords should be used in your content in a few of my previous posts, but for the most part using your keywords 2 to 3 times within the first 150 words is a good starting point.  Additionally, keeping your keyword usage within 2% to 5% of your total word count generally works out best.

In the simplest terms, keywords are words that people will use when searching for your products or services.  For example, a business in the Chicago area looking for accounting services may type the following phrase into a search engine: “Best Chicago Accounting Firm.” Each word in the phrase, “Best Chicago Accounting Firm” is a keyword.  Now clearly, if you’re our hypothetical Chicago Accounting Firm you wouldn’t use any of those keywords by themselves because it wouldn’t make sense.  No one is going to do a search using only one of those terms – at least not anyone looking for an accounting firm in the Chicago area.   So we use terms “Long-tail keyword” or “Short-tail keyword” to describe the type of keyword “phrase” we’re talking about.  True to the description of each term, Long-tail keywords are longer search phrases and Short-tail keywords are shorter phrases.  Each type of keyword traditionally provides different benefits, results, and traffic, but I’ll post more about keywords and how they directly relate to search engine optimization in my next post.  Stay tuned.