Hey all,

How should I incorporate keywords into my site? I can see the Edit Keywords and Description option under the Edit menu, but should I just have them on my index page or apply them to all pages? If I apply to all pages should the keywords be unique to each page or the same for every one?

Do you have any tips on how to phrase keywords or any I should avoid?

Keywords on all pages, but doesn't have to be unique

Each page should have a list of key words that is specific to that particular page. The key words need to appear somewhere in the text of the page, or the page may be penalized for "key word stuffing"..
Google, and probably other search engines, will crawl the page and identify their own lists of key words for the site and that list will override, for the site overall, whatever <meta> list of key words you have specified.
It is still a very useful exercise to go though the text and identify key words, since in doing so you may find that you need to 'improve' the text with additional, important words that you want to be searchable .

The page title (<title>...</title>) and the description for the page (<meta name="description" content=".....">) are probably more important than the key word lists for SEO purposes. Pay a lot of attention to those!
More information in this Google Guide:
https://static.googleusercontent.com/me … -guide.pdf

Use individual words as key words, separated by commas. Avoid using 'phrases' where the the same key word is repeated in a lot of different combinations with other words. 'Phrases', or sentence fragments, are best included in the title and/or description instead.

Actually I disagree. You MUST have unique keywords that are relevant to the page material. If you don't and just stuff a bunch of keywords that are exactly the same on every page Google will actually demote your ranking! SEO is such a huge topic and there is a million ways to help improve it but the basic guidelines should still be followed.

Google really changed in 2012 here is a good article defining the changes if your interested: http://searchengineland.com/2012-google … iew-139780

I think Per has just said the same thing Steve, didn't you read it? What I actually said Steve if you read my comment properly "but doesn't have to be unique" I didn't say you can't put different keywords on each page. It depends on what the site is about if you site has a theme all the way through about cars, then your keywords would therefore be about cars. If for eg one page was about selling T-shirts and the next selling apples, then you would use different keywords. SEO is indeed a hot topic, but Google do change their ways of searching, they are harder to anticipate than something like Bing or Yahoo

So sorry I didn't see that:) My page wasn't refreshed I guess. I hope you didn't take offense to this post it wasn't meant that way . All I am saying is that even if your websites is all about cars you should still try to make the keywords unique to the subject matter on each page.

Offence Steve? No not at all, in fact when I reread my original post I can see that it could be taken as ambiguous, I should of explained better. I think your way is probably more right anyway, I'm just a bit lazy which leads me to another question I'll ask on a different thread of how long people expect to get their sites either for themselves or clients onto Google search page, or the first page.

Thanks for the replies folks, very helpful.

The link Per provided was very informative, but it did raise one small question regarding the alt text for images. Should the alt text be different to the image name and should it be a brief description of the image itself or a single word?

Finally managed to track down my webhost and gain access to the account, so the site should hopefully go live in the next couple of days

The alt text should be a brief description of the image, answering questions such as: who? what? where? when?, etc.
Include place names and names of people in the picture, as appropriate and applicable to each particular image.
It would often be a single sentence but could be more if needed for the text to serve as a substitute for the image itself.
Search engines cannot 'see' and interpret the content of the image directly and therefore use the alt text to place the image in the correct context in response to search queries.