In a previous article, I talked about key words and how to gather them. If you research online, you will find some web designers recommending having hundreds of keywords including plurals and regions and misspellings and colors and ...

And that's probably fine if you plan to spend money in Adsense or some other PPC (pay per click) advertising service. What if you haven't reached that point yet? What if your budget is pocket change?

The good news is that if you do good keyword research, you will be able to narrow down a large list to your 50 biggest hitters. This is a reasonable number to aim for since it is likely that your site only has 10 pages or so anyway. You can't stuff 500 keywords into 10 pages and not have it look spammy. (If you have more pages in your project then feel free to add more.)

So you take your top 50 manageable keywords and split them into your 10 pages. They will very likely fall into ten or twelve related topics and these will make good subjects for your 10 pages. Use them in your titles, your image alt tags and your text - preferably near the top of the text, a mention in the middle and then again near the bottom. And if you code your own webpages, you can make sure you are using header tags and meta tags with those keywords. Try to limit your title tags to 60 characters and your meta description tag to 25 words while using as many of your keywords (on the specific page) as possible.

Then have someone read each page and make sure it is easily understandable. They will point out spelling and grammar errors that inevitably creep in. Leaving those things in will distract from the message of that web page and break the reader's attention span. Even if your readers are not English Majors, bad writing still feels bad. You might not recall what a dangling participle is but you will get annoyed or impatient if you read a webpage with incorrect punctuation. It just doesn't read well even if you don't consciously know the rules of grammar.

So if you have made it easy to read each page and not cluttered the page with too many keywords then you are ready to post your site live. You'll feel good that you have taken your best shot at giving these 10 pages the best structure and keyword optimized content you can. But your content optimization job isn't over. Nope.

You have to go back and measure the results. How do you do that? You either get access to the website analytics or install them and watch what happens. Say your site is about fruit recipes and over a month you see that your banana smoothie page is not doing well but your apple crumb cake page is gaining more readers every day.

You go back and do a bit more keyword research and find that people are not searching for banana smoothies anymore. They are now looking for banana italian ice recipes. So you rewrite the article with keywords related to banana flavored italian ice and repost it. Likewise, you can look at the apple crumb cake page and write another page (your 11th) about optional toppings for you to have with your apple crumb cake recipe or you write another recipe variation and post that with links between the two pages.

But your job isn't over. As this article is being written, Bing and Yahoo are combining search results and Google has had two major search algorithm adjustments in the last three months. The rules of SEO are always changing and the best keywords will change with season and current events.

If you stick with it, you will see success with work and regular effort. It is best if you take this article as just one of many data points and research the topic further. You will see that some common keyword techniques and recommendations have been left out or merged together for this article.

The subject of the next article in this series will be on website promotion. Thanks for reading and if you want to know more about how we can help you with your web site's SEO, please visit our website.