Keyword Tip and tricks for bloggers

Keywords are the means by which your blog is indexed and placed in the search rankings. It pays to do keyword research on your subject and use these keywords at appropriate places in your blog.........

After deciding on the subject of your blog (if it is based on a single subject) you will have to do some research to find out the correct keywords for your blog. First to see the competition for your keywords enter your subject line in the Google search box and hit Enter. Google will turn up all the websites having that keyword and the number of sites will also be listed.
Look at the Page source of your competing sites for the keywords they use by going to View--->Page Source.
Remember the number for your site will have to climb through that number to reach the top of the rankings. If you are still undecided on the subject it would be better to choose a subject where the competition is less and your site will appear on the first page of the search results.

You can also see the number of blogs on the same subject by conducting a search at Technorati.com for your subject keywords.

The market for your subject can be seen by going to sites like wordtracker.com and overture.com. Enter your keyword in the box and hit Enter and you will see how many people have been searching for that keyword. Always choose a subject with a large enough demand yet not too much competition. I have blogged about this in some detail in How to start a Blog.

The Title metatag should contain five to ten keywords. It should be descriptive about your site. Avoid having a title like "Welcome to...my site". Total numbe of eighty to ninety characters.

The description metatag should contain around 160 to 250 characters including spaces. The description should be summarized. The keyword metatag should contain your keywords in order of importance.
Commonly misspelt words and plurals should be included in the keywors tag.
Do not stuff it with keywords and do not repeat keywords. Around 800 to 1000 characters (40 to 45 words) with spaces seems to be the optimum size. You can repeat the keywords but not one after another, not continuously in a row and less than four times.
Google and now Alta Vista are now ignoring the keyword tag.

Separate each keyword and keyword phrase with commas. You can generate metatags automatically online based on the keywords you provide. Just Google for the term "metatag generator" and go to any one site, type in your data and then copy and paste the metatags in your blog template just below the "head" tag.
Use those keywords which are repeated in the body text and the other tags.
The keywords in the metatags should match the body context.

Do not indulge in Keyword spamming or Keyword stuffing. Search engines are aware of these strategies. Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. There are a number of online keyword density analyzers where you can submit your page for an analysis. As before Google for them to analyze your keywords. An optimum figure happens to be about 500 to 800 words per page with a keyword density of 5-8%.