You control what is on your site. So controlling the on-page factors that affect your rankings is pretty easy. We’ll discuss the off-page content later on.
Right now, your page title is one of the most important on-page aspects that affect your rankings as far as search engines are concerned. You NEED the TITLE tag. The best place, generally, to put your keyword phrase is at the beginning of your page title. Short titles are generally better. “Widgets For Sale” is generally better than “XYZ Store Sells the Best Widgets Anywhere.”
Remember though, your page title is not just seen by search engine robots. The user who is sifting through results will also see this title, so creating some weird combination of keywords might get you a rankings boost, but the user who sees it might not click that link because the title doesn’t say much to them. You have to try and create a happy medium between keywords that the search engine will pick up on, and something that is also useful to the user.
Headings are also useful. Headings can carry a lot of weight. They can be big, so sometimes it’s hard to use a H1 tag on a page. You can look into learning CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to reduce the size of headings though. Try to create headings that only contain the most important keywords, but they have to make sense to the users reading the page as well, so random keywords won’t cut it.
The body text is important as well. Your body text should be keyword rich. Search engines generally place more weight on words found near the top of the page. Because of that, you should try and place some keywords at the top of your page, and you need to try and make your writing natural. I will write some more about incorporating keywords into your text in an upcoming entry. Using bold, italics, or underlining keywords can also help, but don’t do it too much, as it makes a difference in the readability of the text. Also, placing keywords in your outgoing links can help as well.