Seo for set keyword

One of my sites used to rank #1 in the world for a set keyword for most search engines. That keyword brings in the most visitors. Now that keyword is more popular, it ranks about 3rd - 5th place for this world

Does anyone know of any tips to increase seo ranking for a set word or phrase without simply repeating it everywhere (which probably wont work)

I know of the following ones:

Place keyword in the title tag
Use H1s with the keyword
Ancor text for incoming links

any others?

It's not just <h1>, but other headings too.

I'm no SEO expert, but my advice would be simply to use the keyword wherever natural in your page. Don't force it.

Keywords in the URL ("www.keyword1-keyword2.com") also help. Some say that hyphens are better, but for your domain name itself I would use whatever "looks" right. Google can still spot the keyword even without the hyphen.

Name your pages using (relevant) keywords, rather than something useless like "page1.html".

well i cant change my domain name. and yes, I believe hypens are better as it seperates the words. I guess I could make some more pages called this keyword.

Careful!

Adding junk/duplicate content may incur a penalty from Google.

Unless you really know your SEO, beware of doing anything unnatural. Tricking Google is risky.

Point taken, thanks

What you need is to concentrate the focus of the page on the keyword.

It's not just about whether the keyword appears in your content. It's about how much emphasis you give it.
is it at the start of headings? is it in link texts? is it in images? do you have stop words?

Here's a technique that has worked for me: for any single phrase (eg.: car sales) I build one page where -
- url is SE friendly version of the phrase (site.com/car+sales/)
- title is the phrase (<title>car sales</title>)
- phrase is at the start of description meta tag
- phrase is at the start of keywords meta tag
- h1 is the phrase - matches title (<h1>car sales</h1>)
- h2 is variation of or contains the phrase (<h2>cars on sale</h2>, <h2>cheap car sale</h2>, <h2>online car sale</h2>)
- when possible, all links to the page use the keyphrase (<a...>car sales</a>)
- at least 3 <strong>/<em> occurrence of phrase within paragraph text (<strong>car sales</strong> and <em>car sales</em>)
- The keyphrase appear in one of the first 2 and one of the last 2 paragraphs of the document
- there's an image using the phrase in its source and alt text (<img src="/img/car+sales.jpg" alt="car sales"/>)
- the page links to itself with the title of the page

PS.: for a phrase like "car sales", it's tempting to use stop words like "cars for sale" or "cars on sale" and it's important to structure your content so you can avoid these. words like "the", "and", "a", "for", "or", "in" and a few others do nothing but diminish the density of your keywords within a phrase...

Thanks for your time spinal. I will give that a go. I just need to structure it so it doesnt look made up just for that purpose I guess.

what about file paths, eg:

scr= 'car-sales-images/care-sales.gif'

etc

or is that just silly?

?

I've never found file paths to be any real use to SEO. Some people say it makes a huge difference to google, but I have never really seen a difference in it. I had a site ranked #17002 on google and I did some SEO and brought it up to 3. After a while I worked on my SEO and added the hyphen pages and all that jazz and it dropped down to rank 6. So I completely took the site down for 3 months, and I googled the keyword and I was rank 2, with no site or nothing. So that just confused me, how not having a site gave me a better rank than having content... But what it was it was reading my new design with the proper H1s and stuff added to it making it a better site. Point is, whatever changes you make, it may take 3 months to see your final results, and you may drop down before you go up.

with images, it's the file name that matters the most, so just car-sales.gif will do...

Is that is a bit black hat?

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Not at all, but it doesnt really offer benefit. It's the filepath of documents that matter... filepaths of images are not important IMO.

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Hey, altho I am new to the forum and I am also new to SEO, I have found that for it to really take any effect within the google search engine you will have to wait between 3 - 6 months to see its full extent.

Repeating the keyword through out your pages will not help you at all as google crawls the page like a person and expects to see the keyword only in its natural content where it is required.

The URL string is important http://www.keyword.co.uk/keyword/
Heading tags not just <h1>
Links on the page with the keyword
Links to and from your page to Google Page Rank sites above 7
Image names and alt/title tags
Meta Tags
Bold/Italic words

Javascript menus affect the crawling of pages as well, it seems that it does crawl past the script, it is best to have the javascript in a extrenal file.

There are probably many more factors that affect the keyword page rank as well but these are the ones that I have found to be most useful.

Wayne