Website design for better rankings is becoming increasingly thematic, both for content and structure.  Head terms are root industry key phrases such as ‘ web site design ‘. A tail term would be ‘ website design in Austin ‘ for example. Most often, a website’s ranking campaign will fail because too many head terms are used. Being realistic and looking at your competition is the start of using the right ratio of head to tail terms. In any industry, the competitiveness of your keywords are based on how much competition there is for those same keywords. Often, you may in fact also get better conversion when you target more tail terms that you may - 1. rank better for, and 2. target more qualified leads (compared to the generic head terms).

Head keywords are good to use for the home page. This will help a search engine establish the main theme of your website. Sub pages should use the tail terms that you are targetting and that will target your specific type of customers for service(s) you provide.

Optimize per page! This is often overlooked and another campaign killer that will stump your ranking efforts. Every web site page should not focus on more than 2 keywords. Focusing on more will dilute the effectiveness of the website key phrases you are targeting.

Finally, the titles, metas and tags should also focus on one or two key phrases - NOT - all the keyword phrases you can think of!

Look at your top 10 competitors, evaluate if they are optimized, how many backlinks they have, how big their website is, how old their website design is, and what specific keywords they are targeting both in their content and meta tags.