This is Part 3 of a series on how to select the proper keywords for a web site or pay-per-click search engine marketing campaign.

The first thing I need to cover is the fact that since I sent out Part 1 of this series several weeks ago, Yahoo/Overture has made a couple changes with a free tool from their web site. This is their search term suggestion tool, which allows one to see the number of searches for a given keyword or phrase over the last month. First they took the tool down, and upon my writing to them about it, they replied that they were taking the tool away, but replacing it with another tool that you could only access inside their Yahoo Search Marketing interface. In other words, you would have to have a pay-per-click account with Yahoo Search Marketing in order to use the previously free tool.

But despite that, they have now put the tool back up and it is working again, but displaying results from January 2007. Maybe that's their compromise. They'll still have the free tool, but you don't get up to date results.

What Do You Do with the Keywords

OK, back to the series. If you have read the previous two installments, you should now have a list of keywords that you want to use for your web site or pay-per-click marketing campaign.

First of all, for a pay-per-click marketing campaign, there is no real limit on the number of keywords you can use. The only limit is that they should be productive for you and should result in clickthroughs to your web site, and they should also result in conversions, i.e. people filling out the form on your site to become either a lead or a sale. The Google and Yahoo interfaces will tell you both of these things and you should check regularly to make sure the keywords you chose are working.

For use in meta tags on a web site, your block of keywords should be no larger than 900 characters, including spaces.

Once you have selected your list of keywords that you want the site to rank well for, your next job is to prepare pages on your site so that they can potentially rank well for those keywords. This is called "on-page optimization."

Generally, you should have each page of your web site be optimized for no more than 2-3 of your keywords, i.e. ones that all describe the same general topic, but not much more than that.

On-page optimization consists of:

1. Ensuring that the text on that page uses the keyword multiple times, but not in a weird or unusual way.

2. Put the keyword into the keyword meta-tags.

3. Write a meta-tag description for the page that uses the keyword. This is the description the search engine lists under your title when your page appears in the listings.

4. Write a title tag for the page that uses the keyword as the first word or words. The title tag is what you see at the top of your browser when you are looking at that page.

5. There is a thing called "alt tags" on a web page. This is a text tag that gets attached to a graphic or photo on your page. Use the keyword in the alt tags where possible and appropriate.

6. There is a factor to be aware of when optimizing a page for a given keyword, called "keyword density." Search engines will look at a page and count the number of words on it, then judge it for a specific keyword or phrase, in part, by the relation between the number of times the keyword appears, and the number of words on the page.

7. Stay away from uses of Java that add dozens or hundreds of lines of code to the source code of your web page.

8. Use style sheets on your web site. Most web authoring programs allow you to create style sheets, and there is an excellent program called Style Master which helps you create style sheets, and they have an excellent (though long) tutorial. The reason style sheets are good, is that it improves your keyword density. It gets all your paragraph formatting information into a separate file.

9. Using the keyword in the "h1" and "h2" tags, meaning the headlines and sub-headlines. To do this you have to use stylesheets for the site, using them to specify the paragraph formatting.

Link Building

Once you have done the on-page optimization, it is time to start building links to your web site. This is called off-page optimization, and is more important, in fact, much more important, than the on-page optimization.

I believe that the most successful practice right now in terms of link building is to have a two-pronged approach: doing one action to build quantity links and another to build quality links.

The action that I have found most successful in terms of building quantity links is via submitting articles to article directories, also called content hubs.

See my articles on content hub submissions:
http://www.realwebmarketing.net/article124.html
http://www.realwebmarketing.net/article125.html

Of course one of the important keys here is to use the keywords from your list in the articles you submit to the hubs.

The action I have found most successful in terms of building quality links is to write press releases that have a specific format and contain keywords, and then put them out on an RSS feed. RSS stands for "really simple syndication" and is a method of disseminating information out quickly on the web. It also creates higher quality links.

My experience has been that doing both content hub submissions and press releases out on RSS is a great one-two punch that really pumps up the links to your site and improves your rankings for your chosen keywords.