For the best search engine optimization, you want your keyword phrase to be repeated at least twice in your first two paragraphs. Have a look at the first paragraphs in the example of one of my articles below. I bet you don’t have any difficulty in figuring out that the keyword phrase is “Web site promotion”.
You also want it to appear an appropriate number of times throughout the content of your page. How many times is appropriate? As Christine Oakley explains in her article, Keyword Density Explained, you want to aim for a keyword density of between two to five percent to get your pages into one of the top 20 spots on the major search engines.
You want to try to stay within this range, because if you overdo using your keyword phrase, search engines may view you page as spam and give it a low ranking or even not list it at all. (If you’re not familiar with keyword density, Christine’s article explains how to calculate it and use it to improve your search engine rankings.)
Generally, when I'm working on this part of search engine optimization, I use what I call the “acouplea” approach. I make sure that I use my chosen keyword phrase several times at the beginning of the piece, several times in the middle and several times at the end.
If your page includes images, be sure not to waste the opportunity to put your keyword phrase into the alttext and caption fields if at all possible.
