Keywords and SEO - make it more effective

Keywords and SEO - vital to t-shirt companies I think - especially if you are hoping to sell online, you need to get people to your site...one top tip is to check out and do what Tim at Assault Blog says - I learned a heap from reading is blogs...I'll try outline some things I have done and found useful...

One way to give you keywords more weight for targeted customers is to add you ad to the google locals directory/google maps, then when people search for "keyword in Location X" you'll be up near the top in the map listings..this also helps pull your site to the top of the listings in the top 10..

With keywords you should have them in your:
- title [title] [/title] *change the ['s to <'s
- header [h1][/h1] tags on each page
- in the text you write start it with the keyword if possible
- in the text you write use [strong][/strong] tags around your keyword
- when linking to your page externally have your keywords in the [a href = "www.yoursite.com" alt = "lovely keywords" title = "lovely keywords"]lovely keywords[/a] *change the ['s to <'s
- the effectiveness of keywords is dependent to a degree on the number of "votes" (links) it gets from other sites to your site..the higher PR (google page rank) of the page linking to your site using your keywords in the a href the stronger the vote for those keywords to your page the more effective or higher ranking your page will be...

When using keywords there are two sides to it, onsite and offsite..the onsite is what you have in the text of your page and the html you use (w3c verified pages, with clean, spider friendly html help your onsite keywords no end)..the offsite is links back to your page using your keywords...you can get these from directories, blogs about you, blogs you write yourself..the top tip here would be to write a blog with links to your site and then submit this blog to social bookmarking sites, digg.com, mixx.com, stumbleupon etc which would then multiply the number of links using your chosen keywords back to your site strengthening them...

........or at least thats a synopsis of what I have read..I don't know if it is fool proof, I doubt it but for some of my keywords it has worked...for my google anyway..actually, if anyone can try google "quirky ladies t-shirts" or "ladies t-shirts" from the entire world, not locally, I'd be curious to see if I feature..would really appreciate it..

Anyway, good luck with keywords and SEO - its an endless pit of research and work but interesting none the less..any other top tips you have please leave a comment and let me know - would love to hear from you...knowledge is no burden..