How Much Time Should I Spend Optimizing My Pages?

Finding and using keywords for optimizing your pages is an important step. However, spend your time getting the basic "on-page" optimization correct and then move on. Trying to squeeze every drop of traffic out of a page just isn't an efficient way to work.

As the web evolves, off-page optimization will become more important because it relates more to humans voting directly for content they find on another site. What this means is that developing off-page factors is more beneficial. Spend your time developing great content and finding niche directories to obtain links from. Your business will be better off if you build more content rather than wasting time editing and re-editing existing pages. It also appears that the sheer size (number of pages) can also count as an off-page factor.

On-Page Factors To Consider

Make sure to do enough initial keyword research so you have a good collection of keywords and phrases that cover your topics. Some general keywords are good intemixed with a lot of high demand and low supply. Some "SEO" services will tell you not to bother with the more general keywords because there is just too much competition, but, the use of general keywords can be used in search queries with "AND", so don't limit yourself to not using them. Just don't concentrate all your efforts using a general keyword as the only one you use.

Don't expect to rank high for the more general keywords. You have to start out trying to rank well for the more specific keywords and then as time passes you'll notice that you begin to rank better for the more general ones.

Make sure your keyword is used in the TITLE tag, DESCRIPTION tag, KEYWORD tag, the H1 tag and at least once in the first paragraph of your page content. That should suffice for a search engine to understand what your page is about.

Off-Page Factors To Consider

Make sure to get some in-bound links from appropriate directories and from some good sites that relate to your theme (don't spend too much time sweating the ranking - a low ranking site today might become a high ranking site tomorrow). Concentrate on quality and not quantity. Also, you might want to consider a few link exchanges but this is probably not very important today as it was yesterday. Check out the article "SEO Basics - Good Link, Bad Link", where you can find a good description of useful linking strategies vs. useless linking strategies.

Revisiting Low Ranking Pages

If you still find your pages not ranking well after a reasonable amount of time (weeks or months later), try adding an extra keyword to your TITLE tag and increase the density of your keywords in your content. Some business concepts just take longer than others to start ranking, but, usually, patience rules out at the end.