Back in the day (and today so far as some websites are concerned) to top the search engine rankings, once you had identified your keyword phrases you would place them repeatedly in as many places on your site’s pages as you possibly could, i.e. keyword spamming.

These days, it’s important to ensure you don’t spam your website and carefully consider your keyword usage, so whereabouts on a web page should you be looking to optimise?  Here are my recommendations for the most useful parts of a page in which to place your keywords:

No. 1 - Title tags

Probably the most important on site SEO ranking factor, so far as Google is concerned anyway.  Place the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page's HTML header and watch your rankings improve – provided you do it right that is, overdo (spam) it and you could well see your site rank plummet.

No. 2 - H1 tags

Every page on your site should make use of H1 tags if you want to get the page content fully optimised.  Try to avoid duplicating the text within the title tag and meta description as this can work against you, as can CSS manipulation in order to over use H tags on a page.

No. 3 - Actual Page Content

Content is still considered king by many, and rightly so.  Previously, SEO concerned itself with issues such as keyword density but I don’t believe these to be issues anymore with regards trying to obtain the perfect percentage. 

Get your keywords in content that reads well to the user and they’ll deem the page relevant to what they are looking for.  Making them bold doesn’t make too much difference from an SEO point of view either, they’re useful for catching the user’s attention but if you’re placing your keywords in every sentence or paragraph, the text will just start to look unappealing.

No. 4 - Internal Links

A good internal linking structure to your website is important (and often overlooked) – therefore it follows that keyword usage within the title and anchor text of your links will assist rankings, in particular for deep content pages.  Like with H1 tags, be sure to use variants of the keyword within the titles, anchors, H1 and title tags.

No. 5 – URLs

Having your keyword in your domain name is no bad thing, two keywords is also good but be sure to use hyphens to separate keywords and try not to have more than 2 hypens in the domain name.

Page names containing keywords are also important too, as demonstrated in search engine results where the keywords are highlighted in the url if they appear.  Also, a page name with the right keyword in it has the relevancy factor and is more likely to be ranked and clicked than a page which doesn’t – for example, if you’re creating a page tailored towards “seo ranking factors”, which do you think looks more relevant “seo_ranking_factors.cfm” or “seornkfac.cfm”.