Keyword placement in title, description or keywords

[djnewbold]

Hello,
I just posted my new website (newboldart.com) recently. I have been reading these forums and testing keywords, meta tag analyzers and KEI Analysis. My head is spinning! I have a few questions:
- are keywords best put in the Title, page description or the keyword box?
- Should you repeat important words in each of those or use new words?
- How does one get these robot.txt files that I seem to be missing?
- How does one find out your google ranking and do I really want to know because I must be at the very bottom of the list.
Thank you in advance for information
:)

[Beginner]

- are keywords best put in the Title, page description or the keyword box?


The title is the most important of those title.


- Should you repeat important words in each of those or use new words?


Repeat - yes
Cram - no

If you can write in good English and repeat your keywords often then this is best. Search engines are getting much better at syntactical analysis so dropping to poor English to keyword jam is unadvised.


- How does one get these robot.txt files that I seem to be missing?


Write one. At the most basic (and most are) you're looking at two lines in a text file. The robotstxt.org (http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html) site is more than you need or you can look at this sub-domain's own robots.txt (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/robots.txt).



- How does one find out your google ranking and do I really want to know because I must be at the very bottom of the list.


This is dead easy - in fact, I think you're overcomplicating things or winding me up :) - pick your keyword (better; your key-phrase) type it into Google. If you're #1 then you have ranking #1, if you're #14 then you have ranking #14.

You might even want to check out the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) and turn on PageRank to see how Google rates your site.

<snip>

[djnewbold]

Oopps - sorry but thanks for the information. I noticed that other people asked for help for finding out what is wrong with their site but didn't realize not was not appropriate. think that I can figure out the robot txt now
THanks!

[Marcia]

<off-topic>
Oopps - sorry but thanks for the information. I noticed that other people asked for help for finding out what is wrong with their site but didn't realize not was not appropriate. think that I can figure out the robot txt now
THanks!No problem with your post, none at all.

That's what Moderators are for, and it's easy enough to contact one (or more) if anyone feels something needs attention.
</off-topic>

Just a note - sometimes there isn't anything you'll want to put into the robots.txt but to avoid getting 404's when search engines try to access it, you can name a blank page robots.txt - and that'll do the trick.

Don't worry about keyword densities - write page copy naturally for users and include the pertinent keyword phrases "naturally" but not overdone, it isn't necessary.

- How does one find out your google ranking and do I really want to know because I must be at the very bottom of the list.If it's for a client site you may need to do "reporting" for them, but if the site is your own, traffic is the most important thing - and conversions - more important than rankings, which can take a while to get with Google.

For myself, I find the simplest, quickest way is to watch the web stats (AWstats is fine) and see what keyword phrases people are coming to the site on. I look up those phrases at the engines to see how the site is doing. If there are no visitors for other keywords, then they're not ranking well enough to get traffic, so I can tell that way. Saves time and for my own sites that's quite enough.

[djnewbold]

I am still confused about the robot txt file. From the reading I have done it sounds like you would put the robot txt file if you do not want the spiders to see your page (which doesn't make since to me since why go on the web if you don't want to be found?).
If I am advised to put in a robot txt line this is what I found:
<meta NAME="Robots" CONTENT="INDEX">
and that this line should be put after the <head>
Is this correct? and should I add it?
Thanks