This is how I normally do this:

1. Make sure the domain name contains the keywords.
2. Make the title of the page my exact keywords I am targeting, capitalized appropriately.
3. Make the very first text on the page the keywords in an H1 (header) tag.
4. Put an introductory paragraph that uses the keywords right after the H1 tag.
5. If I have a lot of text on the page, break it up with H2 tags that contain variations of my keywords.

Unfortunately, catpictures.blogspot.com was not available, so I couldn’t do #1. Since competition for “cat pictures” was light, I knew that I could get by without worrying about it. But if you are targeting more competitive keywords, make sure that your domain name (or subdomain name) contains the exact phrase you want to rank for. This especially helps for MSN.

Also, I didn’t do number five for my feline photos blog, because being a picture gallery there wasn’t that much text on the page. But I’ll give you more detail on how that works in case your page does have a lot of text.

Let’s say that I have an article on pontoon boats that I want to rank for the phrase “pontoon boats”. This is what I would do for the on-page optimization: Try and get a domain name with the words “pontoon boats” in it (www.pontoonboats.com would be perfect). If there isn’t anything available, then setup a subdomain for it (pontoonboats.mydomain.com).

Make the page title “Pontoon Boats”, put the H1 tag at the beginning of the text as “Pontoon Boats”, then break up the article with H2 subheadings like “Maintaining Pontoon Boats”, “Pontoon Boats for Fishing”, “Are Pontoon Boats Fast?”, etc. You don’t want your subheadings to be exactly your keywords like the main H1 heading and the title, but you want the subheadings to contain your keywords.

That’s really all I do with on-page optimization, and as I said before, if the competition is light I don’t always do all five of those things.

There are other things that search engine marketers focus on and spend a lot of time with (things like keyword density and image alt tag density, etc.), but since I don’t try to rank for fiercely competitive keywords I don’t usually bother with all of that. I leave the ranking of really tough keywords to the SEO gurus, because to me it’s just too much dang work. To me, ranking for really competitive keywords is like owning a boat: it requires far too much time, money and effort to maintain to be worth the end result (going to the lake three times a year–sorry boat owners!).

No thanks. I’ll rank for moderately competitive keywords and only have to do a little bit of maintenance every now and again, and by multiplying that effort I’ll earn 10 times the AdSense and YPN revenue that I would if I focused on one tough set of keywords.