This is something most major companies don’t do, thinking that all they need is a flashy page with lots of colours and pictures to get peoples attention. But there’s not point in presenting a pretty page if search engines can’t recognize it. Its best to optimize each page so that your site can be listed and indexed in search engine result pages if people are trying to find more information on your niche. Here’s a step by step guide on what you need to do:

1/ URL - The URL is playing an important part in terms of keyword considerations. By having your main keywords in the URL, you are already a few steps ahead of your competition. For example, if you want to focus on the keywords “red widgets”, it’s good to something like http://www.xxxxxx.com/red-widgets.html or http://www.xxxxxx.com/red_widgets.html. Whether you use “-” or “_”, it doesn’t matter since search engines now recognize both characters as spaces. On the other hand if you have a URL http://www.xxxxxx.com/redwidgets.html, your keyword focus will be “redwidgets” not “red widgets”. Be sure to not make this mistake unless you really want to target keywords without a space.

2/ Meta tags - Be sure to have your targeted keywords prominent in the meta tags.
meta Title - For each page, I usually like to have 3 - 7 keywords, with the main targeted keywords at the start. For example, something like “Red Widget at discounted rates”. You can see the main keywords Im targeting are “red widgets” but other keywords would also be recognized by search engines such as “discount red widgets”, “discounted red widgets”, “red widget rates” etc.
meta Description - With the description you can further take advantage of exposing your keywords, increasing your chances of search engines ranking your site higher up. Keep in mind though, to not just write a description for search engines. You need to also take into account that people will read these descriptions in the SERPs and they’re the ones who ultimately click on the link if it catches there eyes. For example “Buy discount red widgets through (company name) with their secure booking system. A huge range of red widgets to choose from to suit all needs.”
meta keywords - The keywords meta tag doesn’t play a huge role these days, but I still like to have at least 5-10 keywords listed just in case. Go through your content as well to make sure your chosen keywords are more prominent than others. For our example here you could have “red widgets”, “widgets red”, “discount red widgets”, “cheap red widgets”, “widgets in red” etc.

3/ Content - Your content better be unique. If you don’t do anything else, at least have original information cause search engines are watching (particularly Google). Once you have original content, make sure you have your main keywords sprinkled in each paragraph. Search engines also recognize synonyms eg hotels, accommodation, lodging etc. So try to use related words throughout the content. Not only do search engines recognize synonyms but even words which have a similar relation can count as extra brownie points. Eg words like hotels and travel, computers and internet, SEO and PPC, houses and property (latent semantic analysis or LSA). As a rough guide have 5-20% of keyword density on your page.

4/ Header tags, bold, italics and underline - These also have significant importance to search engines but don’t go crazy and have your whole article or content bold. It needs to have some form of structure. On a visual basis, visitors love to skim through articles and read the bold text first to see if its worth reading. Understand what your market is after and catch their eyes with fancy titles.

5/ Images - Again, don’t go nuts with images but do utilize it to your advantage. Images catch people’s eyes instantly so place them at critical positions where you want people to focus more attention on. Fill in the alt tags for images and place your main keywords there to attract search engine spiders.

6/ Internal links - Throougout your content you may want to refer to other posts, articles or pages on your site. This is a great way to gain extra links for yourself and also allows search engines to crawl to pages that you think are important. Do this regularly with all your pages to create good internal linking structure. A lot of people just link to their main page, but you need to show search engines that all your pages are important.

7/ External links - Don’t be afraid to links to others. If they have a good site and it adds value to your readers then link to them. Surely you can’t provide your readers with absolutely everything right? Unless you own Google. You may even want to email the sites you link to, notifying them that you have given them a link and see if they’ll link back. If they don’t reply, you haven’t really lost anything. You are still adding value to your readers by showing them an authoritative source. Have a maximum of 5 outbound links as a general guideline if you do link to others from one page.

8/ Mispellings - Did I spell that right? What some seo sites do is have a section dowards the bottom “Common Misspellings for (keywords)”. Now we’re all human and we don’t always type in the words correctly when we search for things so this strategy works very well. Don’t have misspellings within your real content though, cause search engines dont like that. Be sure to have your misspellings towards the end of the page. Search engines, from what I’ve seen seem to like the prominent keywords towards the top of pages.