Hey Ben,

There many various factors need to be counted in on-page optimisation before you start linkbuilding.

• First of all make sure that your pages are accessible to Search Engines, check robots.txt
• Check if you keywords repeat several times (2-3 is enough) in your page's content
• It will be good if you will have the keyword in your page title, but don't keep only the keyword
  for instance if your keyword is "dhow cruise" then the title can be "Unforgettable dhow cruise in US"
• Avoid keyword stuffing in Document
• Avoid multiple titles on one page
• No more than one canonical URL tag
  (correlation research has shown that pages which employ the targeted keyword(s) at the front of the title tag benefit greatly in the rankings. There is a direct relationship between proximity to the front of the title element and prominence/rankings as seen by the engines, and the further back in the page title the keyword appears, the worse the correlation with high rankings)
• Keyword usage in image ALT attribute
• It should be less than 200 words on a page
• Appropriate usage of H1 tag (1 times is enough)
• Meta Keywords and Meta description should be filled it
• Keyword Usage in Bold/Strong/Emphasized/Italics also might help
• Avoid Excessive External Links
• Avoid long URLs
• Don's use a lot of ads on page

Also you can check this article about page layout http://www.vanseodesign.com/seo/page-layout-algorithm/

Cheers,

Russel

I think nobody will blame me if I tell you YES, because until now it is not proven fact that the appearance of your keywords in meta description will make an impact on your rankings. However I will recommend two things:

1. If you use any type of CMS (Joomla or Werdpress) to build your website then you can download the plugin which generates the meta description automaticaly.

2. Still it's better if you will include the targeted keywords from page to meta description, and even if you check SeoMoz on-page optimization, those guys are recommend to do this.

3. Remember that attractive and interesting Meta Description might highlight you among your competitors and bring you additional traffic even if you are not TOP1.

Hope that it was clear.

Actually you can made it bold or italic or underline, whatever you want. The most important is to put your text between

tag, which show Google that it is quote.

I personally do it in Italic and I never had any issue with Google. In bold you can make some of the important keywords, this will help you a little with on-page optimisation.

Thanks,

Russel