However using the keywords tag in conjunction with other areas of your page can help your ranking. Imagine for example if your main keyphrase was "Internet Marketing Articles" and someone typed in that phrase in a search engine that supports meta tags. The search engine would search its database, see that you have the keyphrase "Internet Marketing Articles" in your title tag and a few times in the body of your page, then it will take into account that you have "Internet marketing articles" in your keywords tag too.

So alone keywords/keyphrases in a keywords meta tag will not give you extra relevancy. It will however help to reassure search engines that a page is relevant to the words being searched for.
Regarding the meta description tag, this is what some search engines use when your site is returned in the results for a certain search term. Without it search engines could take the first few lines of code from your page, which mightn't appear so good to the searcher. Hence you should always put a short 10-20 word description of your page in this tag. Make sure your most important keywords are at the start of your description because some search engines will truncate it to suit their own needs.

Don't stuff it with keywords, it's more important for the description to sound right and professional than to have it filled with keywords. Imagine doing a search for something and the site ranked number 1 had a description filled with keywords. Would you click on it? I wouldn't. The bottom line is that description tags will be read by searchers so make sure it doesn't sound unprofessional or just plain stupid.


Where else can I include my keyphrases?

The first few lines on a page are now extremely important and nearly all search engines look at these lines for keywords and phrases. A good idea is to place a slightly altered and extended version of your title tag here, which includes your targeted words once or twice.

The reason why I haven't included longer keyword rich lines at the start of my pages is that they affected the design of my site and made it look less professional, this is because I use tables. I could have put the longer keyword rich lines in at the start of my tables, but these would appear way down the HTML and wouldn't have the desired effect.

The main body of text is of course very important in establishing the relevancy of a page. You should have a keyword/keyphrase density of about 3-7%. Keyword density means the number of keywords as a percentage of total words on a page (excluding HTML tags). Don't repeat keyphrases one after another because the search engines will think you are spamming and your page will not be ranked well.

You should have section headings which contain your target words inside <B></B> bold tags and <h1></h1> heading tags as most search engines will look for text in these tags and will give words inside them extra relevancy.

You should also place you target words in the ALT image tag.

<IMG SRC="akamarketing-logo.jpg" ALT="AKA Marketing logo - number 1 for Internet marketing articles">

This will help increase you keyword density somewhat, to what extent however I'm not sure.

You should also name your pages and if you can directories with your keywords in them, for example the name of this page is ''search-engine-optimization-guide-4.html''. I have separated the words with hyphens as search engines can identify them easier this way.

Another particularly useful approach is to put your keywords in the actual hyperlink text used for navigating from page to page in your site. Both of these methods will help to increase your keyword density.

You should get your own domain name too. Names can now be up to 63 characters in length, so you should get keyword rich domains as many of the big search engines have been noticed to give extra relevancy to websites with keywords in their domain name.

Well that's the end of our search engine optimization guide, if you can implement the methods you have just learned you should have no problem getting a few top 20 rankings.

Just remember to target 2 or 3 keyphrases and have these in the most important areas of your pages. These areas are listed below in order of importance.

• Title tag.

• First few lines of HTML code.

• The main body - <b>, <h1> tags and link text.

• Meta tags.

Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing professional and webmaster of AKA Marketing.com webmaster forums. Visit his webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines, website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and topics.