• On the page title between <title></title>
  
• inbound link text
• headers – one <H1> tag per page
• subheaders – use <H2> or <H3> tags to break up the page copy throughout the page…this page uses H2s. above the “where should I put my keywords?” line is an H2, and so is the “Tips to improve keyword density” tag below.
• In the actual body of the site
• In the meta description tags.
• navigation links when possible
• outbound links when possible

Some possibilities why your keyphrase doesn’t rank higher than the competition:

- The keyphrase is in your competitor domain name or URLs
- There are lots of low PR backlinks with good link text that don’t get shown with the Google link.
- There are lots of internal links with the keyphrase in anchor text, ALT tags, etc…