Any web guru would tell you that the first step to optimising your website is to manage your keywords - and when first planning and designing your site, it's key to know what keywords to use, and how to use them effectively. Here, lets investigate some of the tools available to help with keyword optimisation, and discuss strategies for managing keywords. First, what are keywords and why are they important?

Keywords are the main words used within the content of your site. A site like Chiang Mai Plan acts as a travel portal for visitors to Chiang Mai. It would be unthinkable for the site to not use the word Chiang Mai - after all, in that case, how would a spider know what the site was about? Other important words include 'hotel', or 'tour'. The first question therefore is what are the keywords I should use, and then how frequently should these key words appear?

The keywords to use are of course the words people are searching for. You 'plant' keywords on your site for the benefit of the spiders who are trying to index your site, so how can we find out what words people are searching for?

SEO Book offers a great keyword tool - just tap in a word you think is relevant, and it will send you back an estimation of the searching traffic on all the major search engines - along with of course the keywords that are searched along side it. This is a great (and free) way of finding out if there is any demand for your site, and finding out important keywords.

Once you know what words to include in your site, where should you include them? Well, this is a different topic, but needless to say it should be in the title tag, any heading tags, in the alt parameter for image tags and of course within the text on your site. The next question in frequency? How often should the word appear? Well, that is part of the search engines algorithm, so if we knew that exactly, we'd be able to fix the search engines. There are statistical tools around that can help scientifically with it, otherwise, experts recommend between 2 and 7 % of the words on the page. How can you find out your current frequency?

Check out: Live Keyword Analysis a great little statistical tool, that calculates frequencies for you.