An experienced webmaster knows how to use title and meta tags appropriately, and even may know enough about search engines to know he needs to include keywords in those tags. Once that is accomplished, however, what else can be done to the page to optimize for select keywords?

The header tags are considered some of the most important tags on the page, so be sure to use them. Instead of using a font code to boost the size of text on a line, use the H1, H2, and H3 tags where you can. Including your keywords in the header tags makes your site match as more relevant in the search engines. There are header tags all the way down to H6, but rarely are they used. The most common are the H1, H2, and H3 tags and those will really be enough.

Where you place your text can make a big difference. If you format your page using tables and you keep your text to the left, the keywords in that text appear lower down on the page and therefore not as relevant. By formatting your text to be on the left side, your keywords appear closer to the top of the HTML document and therefore more relevant. This difference is subtle, but may be just the edge you need to outrank your competition.

It's important to spread the keywords throughout the entire page. They should appear at the beginning of the page, the middle, and the bottom. That means don't put all your eggs in one basket, or only include the keywords at the beginning of your article. This is easy to do when you have lots of content to work with, but a bit more challenging when you have little text because you want the text to be well written stuff for humans to read. Find a balance with including the keyword often to attract the attention of the search engine spiders without attracting too much attention from humans.

The navigation through the pages on your site is also extremely important. Perhaps you thought that including a list of link to all the pages of the site was for your convenience? It's for that too, but it's also so that the search engine spiders find all the other pages of the site. The text that appears in these links should be the keywords you want that page to rank for because that's the best way to help a page rank well.

A little known trick you can use to throw in some more keywords without humans seeing anything is the title tags of links. This is simply accomplished by inserting the word "title=", followed by your keywords and enclosed with quotation marks, inside the "A" tag. Your visitors won't see those keywords but the search engine spiders will.

The whole purpose of working on your pages should be to make your content relevant to what people are looking for and ensuring that the search engines know it too. By understanding a little bit of how the language and code works, you'll be able to accomplish that much more easily than if you tried loading your meta tags with keywords. Make your sites friendly to search engines and human visitors and you will see incredible returns on your efforts.