Knowing where and how you can use your keywords will greatly improve efficiency of your search engine optimization.

There are 5 places in a web page where you can use keywords:

The Title Tag The Keyword Meta Tag The Description Meta Tag Alt Tags for images Body copy on page

Of these page Body Copy, readable text on page, is single most important place for your keywords. More about this later.

Let’s first take a look at Title Tag. This is one of tags in head section of html code of your web page and lists title that is displayed in web browser. For instance, Internet Explorer displays this tag in top bar of browser window. But there are other uses for Title Tag as well. Most search engines will index this tag for information about your site and many search engines will use this tag as title of your listing.

In general you can use from 60 to 115 characters in a Title Tag. The Tag can include company name, especially if it is a well known company, and should include your most important keywords. Consider this a short description of your web page. One more thing, Title Tag is also used as link when URL is saved into a web browser favorites list.

The Keyword Meta Tag used to be main way search engines indexed your page. Now-a-days many search engines will simply ignore this tag, but that may not always stay case. Some search engines still take s look at this tag to help categorize your site. There is no reason not to have this tag on your page, just in case. You are not penalized for including a Keyword Meta Tag.

The keywords should be separated by a comma. Put more specific keywords first then put less important and general keywords later on. Search engines no longer pay attention to case of a keyword, so keywords can all be lower case. I have seen recommendations of 25 keywords or 1000 characters in list. In general Keyword pairs or triplets are better than single keywords. I try to have one or two lines of keywords if I use this tag.

As someone who works with small business website owners, I've heard just about every inbound-linking scheme there is. In end, I've only seen five strategies that really work consistently for getting hundreds of links.

Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies

Yet there's perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as much potential as five major ways of getting links.

* Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on down line. Link farms can get you delisted from search engine indexes, so don't even try them.

* Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if you use affiliate software that links directly to your site rather than through a redirect. But many, many affiliates are now placing all their affiliate links in redirects of their own invention, to help protect their commissions from pirates who will simply apply to program themselves to get a discount.

* Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you one-way inbound links, but they'll only have search-engine value a small percentage of time. Many blogs and bulletin boards use search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file formats, automatically encase links in script, or use robot instructions to prevent spiders from following links.

* Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website just for being so great.

* Other one-way incoming link strategies are in this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply chain.)

Now, on to five major ways of getting large numbers of one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all have more potential than some of more madcapped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in order to really gain a distinct advantage in one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two reasons:

* Unfortunately, "eventually" can be a very long time.

* Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can't get search engine traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links if reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website you offer in exchange a link from another website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of defeating link-dampening ambitions of Google and rest. If you have more than one website, you probably are already employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

* You need to have more than one website in same general category of interest or links won't be relevant.