SEO Best practice #4 - On-page optimization

Keyword usage and targeting are only a small part of the search engines' ranking algorithms, and we can still leverage some effective "best practices" for keyword usage to help make pages that are very close to "optimized." A recommended process:

1. Use the keyword in the title tag at least once, and possibly twice (or as a variation) if it makes sense and sounds good (this is subjective, but necessary). Try to keep the keyword as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.
2. Once in the H1 header tag of the page.
3. At least 3X in the body copy on the page (sometimes a few more times if there's a lot of text content). You may find additional value in adding the keyword more than 3X, but in my experience, adding more instances of a term or phrase tends to have little to no impact on rankings.
4. At least once in bold. You can use either the <strong> or <b> tag, as search engines consider them equivalent.
5. At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only helps with web search, but also image search, which can occasionally bring valuable traffic.
6. Once in the URL.
7. At least once (sometimes 2X when it makes sense) in the meta description tag. Note that the meta description tag does NOT get used by the engines for rankings, but rather helps to attract clicks by searchers from the results page (as it is the "snippet" of text used by the search engines).
8. Generally not in link anchor text on the page itself that points to other pages on your site or different domain.

SEO Best practice #3 - Keyword Density Myth

Whenever the topic of keyword usage and search engines come together, a natural tendency to use the phrase "keyword density" gets on the way.  
This is tragic. Keyword density is, without question, NOT a part of modern web search engine ranking algorithms for the simple reason that it provides far worse results than many other, more advanced
methods of keyword analysis. Rather than cover this logical fallacy in depth, we'll simply reference Dr. Edel Grcia's seminal work on the topic - The Keyword Density of Non-Sense.
The notion of keyword density value predates all commercial search engines and the Internet and can hardly be considered an information retrieval concept. What is worse, keyword density plays no role on how commercial search engines process text, index documents, or assign weights to terms. Why then do many optimizers still believe in keyword density values? The answer is simple: misinformation.


Dr. Garcia's background in information retrieval and his mathematical proofs should debunk any notion that keyword density can be used to help "optmize" a page for better rankings. However, this same document illustrates the unfortunate truth about keyword optimization - without access to a global index of web pages (to calculate term weight) and a representative corpus of the Internet's collected documents (to help build a semantic library), we have little chance to create formulas that would be helpful for true optimization.

SEO Best practice #2 - Keyword domination

Keywords also dominate our search intent and interaction with the engines. For example, a common search query pattern might go something like this.
When a search is performed, the engine knows which pages to retrieve based on the words entered into the search box. Other data, such as the order of words ("tanks shooting", vs. "shooting tanks"), spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of those terms provide additional information that the engines can use to help retrieve the right pages and rank them.
For obvious reasons, search engines measure the ways keywords are used on pages to determine the "relevance" of a particular document to a query. One of the best ways to "optimize" a page's rankings is, therefore, to ensure that keywords are prominently used in titles, text, and meta data.
Notice that while there are a lot of results for broad terms, there is a lot less results and thus competition for the specific result.

SEO Best practice #1 - Keyword usage and Targeting

Keywords are fundamental to the search process - they are the building blocks of language and of search. In fact, the entire science of information retrieval (including web-based search engines like Google) is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages inkeyword-based indices. Thus, rather than storing 25 billion web pages all in one database (which would get pretty big), the engines have millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a
particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it much faster for the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second. 
Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of being listed in the search results for "dog", it's extremely wise to make sure the word "dog" is part of the indexable content of your document.