Man! Have things changed in 15 years. When I first delved into the internet the World Wide Web was young and flourishing. I bought an HTML editor, a graphics program, joined a networking group, made a few connections and started building websites. Websites were easy to build. You could take a little HTML, add some tables and sprinkle in a few graphics - instant web site! And getting noticed by the search engines was a snap! I remember buying a $50 piece of software which could submit a URL to over 900 search engines in about 15 minutes, and 'bam' there you go - Instant recognition!

It's not that simple anymore. We're already up to HTML version 5, tableless CSS version 3, and three major search engines feeding most all the others while keeping track of over 14 billion web pages. So what are we doing now? I'm not sure how prevalent the idea is, but I'm getting comments from those who think on-page optimization is not necessary! There seems to be a growing trend among "local" search engine marketers that the Google index is not that important. While "local" SEO should be a part of any marketing plan, it should be realized that not everyone will use Google maps to locate every company they do business with.

It is a given that a website's rank on Google depends a lot more on off-page than on-page factors, but, having Google index your web pages by keywords which you choose should be the first step in optimizing your website.

If you want to your site to be properly indexed by Googlebot you should definitely pay attention to how your page is developed. Google's own Webmaster essentials states, "Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes." They have also posted a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide in which they spend a lot of ink describing how to properly write titles and description meta-tags. They also note that though they no longer take the keywords meta-tag into consideration proper usage of keywords on your page is absolutely necessary to be properly index by their bots.

Remember to optimize your copywriting for keywords. Google's on-page indexing considers such things as:

keyword prominence - a measure of keyword importance that indicates how close a keyword is to the beginning of the analyzed page area

keyword density - a measure of the percentage of keywords to the general number of words on a page

keyword frequency - is the number of times your keyword is used in the analyzed area of a page

keyword proximity -refers to how close keywords that make up your key phrase are to each other.

Though on-page optimization does not count as much as it once did, it is still a necessary starting point to SEM. Check out our "Fast Blast Promotion" service for help and advise on on-page search engine optimization.