It's important to have a keen research on the keywords that you are using, and the KWs that you are using needs to be related on the business that you're handling. KWs used needs not to be long and avoid keyword stuffing for this may lead to banning of the site. For what's important is the quality of the keywords used and the content in the site.

I would create pages targeting the popular keywords and be sure to use the keyword in that pages title, H1 tag, and H2 tag. I would then also do some research to find semi popular keywords that still have a decent amount of interest but not as much competition.   Make a page for each of those keywords too!

Erin,   First off, forget the META keywords tag. It's completely ignored by search engines. Second, don't stuff any key inticator with words. Instead, focus on making a page that has the best content on the Internet for that specific phrase.     One thing that I haven't seen brought up here just yet: you might want to take a look at your site first before choosing a direction for your keyword targeting.   Do you have any users who are really interested in certain content on your site? That's low hanging fruit for you to lift in the rankings, since you know it will lead to users who actually want the content of your site. And, if you're showing up in, say, position 8, you'll have little difficulty bumping up to #1 for a proven term.   Past that, see what the other low hanging fruit is by identifying terms that have low competition, high volume, and are logical fits with the desired 'conversion' action on your target page. So, you'd rather have 'how to buy blue widgets' than just 'blue widgets.'   If you want a harder/more competitive term, focus on longer phrases that include the term. In my widgets example, it also targets the shorter variations of 'buy blue widgets' and just 'blue widgets.' If you can get 30 low-traffic, high-conversion phrases that include the harder term, you'll see an increase in qualified traffic while building the rank of the smaller phrase.   As to how many words to use, and assuming we're not talking about stuffing here, more is not better. Don't try to be all things to all people. Instead, make good content for a specific phrase, and then make another page that has good content for the different phrase.

When it comes to using keywords in website headers you definitely should do that but you really want to go for one main keyword that you know you can rank for.   Sometimes you can try to cram 3 keywords in the header but you shouldn't go over that because the search engines will think that you're keyword spamming and that will have a negative effect on your ranking.   And if you want to target several keywords, the best way to go about doing it is to create more pages on your website. In fact, I highly recommend that for every keyword that you want to rank for create a page that targets just that keyword or no more than 3 keywords per page.   Because if you try to target several keywords on one page it will either be seen as keyword spamming by the search engines or you won't rank for the vast majority of the keywords because targeting too many keywords confuses the search engines resulting in you not ranking well for any of them to be honest.   But you obviously want to target keywords that you know you'll get on page 1 of Google for and that's where analyzing the top 10 competitors for a keyword is crucial.

finding a balance between search volume and level of keyword competition is always difficult, but it can be done. One thing to keep in mind is that even quite competitive terms can be cracked if you're willing to apply some concerted effort to them. For example, I have a website which is less than a year old, but is now ranking highly in a number terms which are very competitive. I'm talking about terms like 'Mortgage Quotes' and so on. My advice would be to make good use of you sites title tags. Choose the terms you want to target, and then make sure that every page of your site includes some or all of the keywords in the window titles. Even without link building, optimising the window title tags in this way has allowed me to get sites into the first couple of Pages of G immediately after indexing. choosing your keywords is the key here, and you should do some research before setting out. use Google keyword checking tool as a starting ground to see what terms are getting a lot of search volume, then google those terms and see hwo many results you get. Try and fina a balance between volume and competition levels and then target your site at this term. Once you've nailed that term you can spread your efforts out more and go after other terms. I'm happy to give you some more pointers by PM if you like.

Use long tail keywords in title and header. Use that keywords in content in such a way that article seem to be keywords oriented and provide useful information. Submit article into article directories to build backlinks. SEO Company India ---This post was edited to remove a commercial link. Read our discussion policies for more Community best practices.

Thank you all so much. I did edit down the keywords for quality.

What is it you want from your site? If it is tons of traffic, relevant or not - then stuff your headers. if it is targeted traffic - then don't. Know what you want and the answer will present itself.