The keywords you choose to appear on your web page will determine how easy it is to find in search engines, and
consequently how successful your page will be. You need to ask the following question:
When someone searches for a site like mine, what would they type into a search engine?
The answer obviously depends on the theme of the web page and requires some imagination. If your page is about
stamp collecting then the phrase "stamp collecting" might be a suitable choice for your 'strategic keywords'.
However, if your page is about collecting British stamps in particular then "british stamp collecting"
would be a better choice.
Then if someone typed in either "stamp collecting" OR "british stamp collecting" your page
would appear in both search results. The difference would be that the first term would return a lot more hits than
the second one, therefore a lot more competition. Running these actual searches at
AltaVista returned 22,778 pages for the search term "stamp collecting", and just 5 for the term
"british stamp collecting" (May 1999).
It follows that your strategic keywords should comprise at least 2 words to be most effective. You should try to
place them in the title tags, the first paragraph on your page, the meta_tags (see the meta_tags
section), and elsewhere in the rest of the page.
Don't overuse them though or the search engines might consider it spamming
and reduce your page's relevancy ranking.
In general if your text reads sensibly and doesn't seem stilted or contrived then it should be OK.
