andyh wrote:
Actually the heaviest google rank weight is given to the title of the website and then the meta tags on the front page.
Its a common trick to extend web page titles with keywords for example and to then add keywords at the bottom of the front page in text thats the same colour as the background

yes title of the website is most important, (what appears in the browser tab) should be also the h1, works for me
and others i see up high.
its why i mentioned h1. I still think heading tags beat meta tags, sites without keywords in the heading tags (h1,2,3 etc) dont rank as high as ones with regardless of meta.
when your site heading is an image banner, you can put the h1 behind it in text with css, as long as its the same words as the banner, and alt tag is the same, ive seen it help rather than hinder...i think google has become insanely complex with imaging lately, they can damn read images also. So if you do this right...when the page loads, your site title on the page loads as text, and then the image banner loads over it.
but hiding text for the sake of hiding it is a no-no.
the hiding text with color thing is a nono these days, google bots see it as black hat, so i wouldnt recommend that tbh...it used to work once upon. The google bots actually compare color contrasts now and read css files, they didnt once upon a time.
i remember one of my competitors webmasters had hidden a bunch of keywords with css and the site went into the top 10...google then refined its algorithms and the site vanished, to the point where they fired the webmaster and hired someone in the UK who is one of the most expensive in the world...their site is still no where near mine, and they are a big corporation. but he did fix the cock ups.
the meta tag keywords must reflect what is on the actual page...if you put for example stillettos in your meta tags, but there is no conversation or words of stillettos on the page, google dont give it much attention, so no cheating there, it doesnt work.
a funny example of keywords in the page title is alex jones forum...look what comes up number 3 for "David Icke Forum" in google...is cause they put it in the title...
www.google.com/search?as_q=david+icke+fo...filetype=&as_rights=