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Yesterday I talked about page design and whether or not the average free site will ever cut the mustard when it comes to looking good to search engine spiders. Today I want to talk some more about search engines and your free sites but this time, instead of talking design, I want to talk about keywords.

Well, actually ... I don't want to talk about keywords at all because trying to nail an individual keyword can be all but impossible for beginners and many more experienced Webmasters. Instead, I want to talk about keyword phrases, those two and three word phrases that lots of people search for but few Webmasters bother to target.

Sure most keyword phrases don't get the same number of searches that the top individual keywords do but there is still a lot of cash to be collected from those targeted keyword phrases. So how do you target those keyword phrases and fit them into your web pages without getting caught by Google's spam filters?

Yesterday I suggested that you take a look at a paper that deals with the way Google may be looking at sites where the keyword thing is over-done. If you're targeting keyword phrases it's very easy to try too hard to get those phrases into every paragraph. But do you have to get those keyword phrases into every possible nook and cranny?

Well if a client comes to us and tells us that he wants a certain keyword phrase used in every paragraph we don't argue, instead we do our best to make the phrase fit into the paragraph in a way that makes sense to someone who's reading it. However, it's not something we would do necessarily do on our own sites.

Before I tell you what we do on our own sites then I suggest that you get hold of the Google toolbar. You may already have it and if so you're one step ahead of everyone else and you can skip the next paragraph.

If you're one of those who don't have the Google toolbar all you have to do is go to Google, do a search for the toolbar, and follow the link to download it and install it. During the download and installation process you'll be asked if you want to activate the highlighter and make sure that you choose that option.

Now that you have it installed go back to Google and do a search for any keyword phrase you may want to target and then hit a few of the pages that turn up on the search engine result pages. The first thing you'll notice is that the keyword phrases that you searched for are now highlighted on the pages you're looking at.

Then, if you're looking and thinking beyond the end of your nose you will notice something else. You asked Google to go looking for a keyword phrase and it returned pages that contained the words contained in that keyword phrase but are all the words that Google has highlighted part of a phrase on the page?

Sometimes those words that Google has highlighted are part of a phrase - the one you asked Google to search for - but more often than not Google has taken the individual words that were contained in the keyword phrase you nominated and located them wherever they appear on the page too. While you wanted a phrase Google looked for the individual words.

So the secret that you can discover here should be fairly obvious. You don't have to bust your nuts fitting an unusual keyword phrase into every single paragraph. In fact I'd seriously suggest that you don't even try to because, if you do, you might well trip a spam filter that undoes all the good work you've been trying to achieve.

Instead, use the keyword phrase once or twice on the page but from then on rely on the words that go to make up the phrase just as you've seen highlighted on those pages that Google showed you.

Now that advice is obviously a little radical compared to what you might read in other places so don't take my word for it. Instead be prepared to do some experimenting of your own; test and evaluate and go on doing it with every new idea you have about search engine optimization.

The search engine algorithms are continually evolving and being refined and that means you have to continue to work hard to keep up with them. At the moment what I've suggested about keyword phrases seems to be working but there will come a time when it won't so don't be lazy and blindly doing what worked yesterday.

Keep on working at developing sites that are attractive to the evolving search engines and you will have some hope of pulling in the search engine traffic that continues to be so valuable when it comes to making money from your sites.