[Minor49er]

I'm a little surprised that the article talks about keywords and not keyphrases. I've found those to be more valuable, especially in the long term, since they're typically harder to unseat if the keywords are too generic. I've set up a quick process for targeting keyphrases in sites and pages that I want to boost.

First, I figure out how much interest is in a phrase that is related to what my site is about. I'll go to Google and Bing and start searching for various keywords and see what autocomplete suggests. If the suggestions are relevant, I'll follow them and note roughly how many results there are and how relevant the top results are to the phrase.

Next, I'll go to trends.google.com and compare the most relevant phrases to see how many searches are being performed for each. Then I compare that against the list of quality results to see where the biggest gaps are. That helps me to identify the phrase that I want to target.

Then, I'll plug the phrase changes into the page that I want new users to land on (typically just the homepage, but this can sometimes be a particular section or article, depending on the site and its goals).

Then, I'll go to seowarp.com and throw the page through a Full Scan which reports on phrasing information. Near the bottom, there's a "Duplicate Content" section that will compare similarities between pages, so if there's anything that is textually similar to my target page, I'll adjust it to drive more attention to the target one for relevancy. I'll also do a Single Page scan for my target page. The results of that scan will have a "First Five Targetted Keywords Detected" section that will show any keyphrases that are found on the page. Again, I'll make sure that my target phrase appears and cull any others that might be taking away any attention from it.

After that looks good, I'll distribute links to the page that contains the phrase. Usually I'll see results start popping up within a week, but can take longer depending on the strength of the campaign.

[butler14]

People (even SEOs and other search marketers) often use keywords and keyphrases and keyword phrases interchangeably, and mean ostensibly the same thing.

[galaxyLogic]

And "meta" -tags. Are those still relevant? At one point I remember reading that Google ignores them

[ijidak]

Wow. This is a really detailed flow. Do you offer consulting services?

[Minor49er]

I used to provide consulting services to small companies and site owners. I became much more focused on web development, but SEO experience has been helpful in a number of ways since.

The biggest case I can remember is a former employer who ran a niche search engine. They were trying to get ranked anywhere, but almost never showed up in any results. It didn't take too long to see what was going on. It turns out that a developer had plugged in a regular expression to generate a canonical link on any given page. However, this regex was case-sensitive and was only whitelisting lowercased letters. So when you would go to the page "/job/12345/Data-Engineer", it would tell search engines to go to "/job/12345/ata-ngineer" instead. The link would still work since the site would use the "12345" portion as the page's ID, but nobody was searching for "ata ngineer". Literally just putting the letter "i" in the regex's flags was enough to start ranking on the first page for a large number of the company's listings (though reindexing took several weeks since the problem was large and existed for well over a year at that point).