* Impossibly competitive keywords that you have no realistic chance of ranking high for them. How do you know if a keyword is impossibly competitive? One rough measure is to look at the PageRank of the webpages currently ranking in the top three for that keyword. If the PageRank of those pages is much higher than the PageRank your site will likely have in the future, you will probably never outrank those pages.

A pay-per-click campaign with Google Adwords of Yahoo! Search Marketing will help you to find which keywords really are searched on by your target audience.

Keyword Density

Keywords appear in the content the right number of times for search engines to recognize the page as relevant, but not so often that it looks like keyword stuffing. The longer the content, the more times the keyword should appear.

Keyword Prominence

Keywords appear in just the right positions within your web pages for search engines to recognize them as relevant. The page title, headings, and first lines of the page are often considered the most prominent positions.

Keyword Stemming/Keyword Variation

* Using variations of the keyword will help ensure web pages appear relevant to the next generation of more sophisticated search engine algorithms.

* In the meantime, variations of popular keywords helps your site appear for the "non-standard" searches on variations of the keyword.

There are three main types of keyword variations:

* Word-stem variations. A stem of a word is its base. For instance, "optimize" is the stem of "optimized." Other stem variations of "optimize" include "optimizing," "optimizer," and "optimization." You can also shuffle the component words of multiple-word keywords. Variations of “website content” would be “web site content,” “web content,” “content for websites,” and “site content”).

* Synonyms (such as “web page content,” “internet content,” or “writing for the web” for “website content”).

* Related terms (such as “internet,” “SEO” or “web page”).

For many people, the SEO side of content feels like a moot point. You need content for your visitors even if no search engine spider ever notices. But every website budget, both of money and time, is finite. If you're ever choosing whether to invest in another link to please search engines or another page of content to please your visitors, don't forget: search engines still like content, too.

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