Themes

Include theme or concept keywords (such as Portuguese wines, if that's what you sell).

Brand Names

Use the more specific brand names of the prodcuts you sell. If you offer services, then try to use service brand names when possible. Legally, you should put the ® reserved symbol or ™ trademark symbol after the names when mentioning them on the page.

Company Names

Include a well known company's name in your keywords if you offer products from that company.

Your Name

You should setup an About Us or an Our Organization page that repeats your name many times so that someone searching for your site will find that page.

Common Words

There are now so many pages indexed on the Web, that a search on many common words such as automobiles or vacation is going to provide a lot of irrelevant listings to the searcher. Nowadays most people are using two or three word phrases to find what they're looking for.

Test Your Keywords

You should see how many other pages match the keywords people would likely search on to find your site. The fewer matches found for your search, the easier it will be to get your page near the top. Check the quality of the matches that appear.

Keyword Phrases

When placing keywords on your page, make sure you always include them in a phrase that the visitor might use. Keep important words chained together in sentences on the page. If the user searches on keyword1 and keyword2 then you only have to have the words in the same proximity on the page. If, however, they search on "keyword1 keyword2" then the words MUST be together on your page, preferably multiple times to find a match.

Bad Spelling

Computer users are notoriously bad typists, therefore often entering poorly spelled search criteria. Look for obvious mistakes people are likely to make when entering your keywords and then incorporate some of them into your pages in some way to pick up the traffic coming from these typing impaired individuals.

Case Sensitivity

Here are three different arguments that I have found on the matter of case-sesitivity from three different sources.:

Mixed Case
If the user types the word Baseball then most engines will search for Baseball with an uppercase B ONLY. If your page has only baseball in it, you will not be found! On the other hand, if they search for baseball and your page has Baseball on it, most engines default to finding words of any case when the keyword used was in all lower case. Therefore, it pays to make sure you have at least some of the keywords in uppercase or starting with an uppercase letter if the user might search that way. The easiest place to do this is in the title of the page, in meta tags, and at the beginning of sentences.

Lower Case
Use lowercase letters with all your keywords and in your page title. If you use capital letters, the search engines will only list you in the categories of that capitalized word. For example, if I use the keyword "Dog" (capitalized) in my page, and then I search for "dog" (NOT capitalized), I will not find my site. But if I use the keyword "dog" (NOT capitalized) in my page, I will find my site listed under both "dog" and "Dog". The search engines will return hits to your page if someone searches for either capital or lowercase keyword searches if your page uses lowercase keywords. It does not work the other way.

Upper Case
In short, always capitalize your keywords. All the major search engines will match upper case letters in search words only against upper case keywords. Lower case letters in searches will match either upper or lower case letters in keywords. This means that if you make your keywords ALL CAPS, the search engines will match you regardless of the case of the search. For example, if your keyword is "FISH", it will be found on a search for "FISH", "fish", "Fish", "fIsH", etc. If your keyword is "fish", it will only be found on a search for "fish".

To see what I've determined and do in regards to case sensitivity with keyword metatags, see our More on Choosing Keywords page.