great article thank you.

@ Lawre:
Thank you very much!

There are no rules, but 2 per 300 word page sounds too few to me — sorry, I could have been clearer about this. Aim to use your main keyword phrase (including one or two variations of it) once per paragraph — but it must read naturally. So, if your page has six paragraphs (as a 300 word online article might) your main keyword phrase could appear 6 times. I’m now offering a service to help with this, if you’re interested — see: http://trafficfolder.com/website-seo-consultant-service/

On anchor text I’ve written a new post to help you and others like you, Martin. It’s at: http://trafficfolder.com/2009/09/anchor-text-in-links/

Feel free to ask more questions.

I think that it helps. I will need to reduce the amount of keywords to only about 2 or so per 300 word page. I don’t know what you mean by “anchor text of links” but I understand about getting inbound links.
Thank again.

Martin, aim to use the keyword phrase (or its variation) only once per paragraph, maybe twice in the first paragraph (but it must read naturally). Make sure that your keyword phrase appears in the anchor text of links (at your site and elsewhere) that go to the page concerned. Get lots of links to your pages — see http://trafficfolder.com/category/website-linking-techniques/ . Also remember that probably your most important page is your index (home) page, so make sure that it is properly optimized at least. Hope this helps!

First let me say thanks so much for the article. I am brand new at this stuff and this website helps so very much.

The article mentions keyword stuffing. When I write an article I try to use several variations of a key phrase or key words. I would imagine that there is no magical number, but could you please give me an idea of what would be considered stuffing?

My articles that constitute a new page on my site are generally around 300 words.

Thanks.

Tony, it certainly matters if you want the page to rank better in Google and so get greater exposure.

If you can’t (or it would be against good practice) to alter the text of contributions you are going to publish (perfectly understandable of course) then my suggestions are:

1) Look for potentially good keyword phrases in a contribution then run these through a keyword tool and Google (to see the number of competing sites for the phrase). Then use the best one in your page title. The contributing author’s title might then become a sub-title if it is very different.

2) Add a little intro to the contribution, placing it between your page title and the author’s title (now a sub-title). Of course use the keyword phrase you chose in step 1 above in your intro.

Hope this helps!

Although your articles helped clarify some things for me about using keywords in meta-tags, the problem I usually have is that new articles & reviews for my sites are written BEFORE any thought can be given to SEO keywords. As editor, I can’t always re-write contributions to optimise a page with the most useful keywords. So, apart from the obvious (title of book or film, creators of the work, etc) how do I go about picking the best keywords out of an already finished text for use in meta-tags? Does it even matter..?

The first post in this mini-series about keyword suggestion tools is: using keyword suggestion tools for article marketing and websites at http://trafficfolder.com/2009/07/keyword-suggestion-tools/

Great article thank you.