Webmasters all seem to have their pet little hates, you know, those things that you wish you didn't have to do. Some hate submitting, others can't stand replying to all those confirmation emails that arrive after submitting a TGP gallery.

"Don't give away important advertising space on your page in an attempt to impress search engine spiders."

My pet hate is optimizing my sites for search engines. For some reason it just plain annoys the crap out of me and I would much rather do anything else but sit here and weave keywords into my text and make sure that every image has an alt tag.

I know everybody optimizes free sites and AVS sites but how many people take the time to optimize TGP galleries? From what I have seen I would have to say that not many do that and I know that more than a few of mine have slipped through without any thought of making them attractive to search engines.

In today's throw-away society, TGPs are the online version of the plastic bottle, so why waste time making them attractive to Google and its compatriots?

Yesterday I was given a sharp lesson in just how important it is to optimize everything, including TGP galleries for search engines. Around this time last year, and even earlier, I was making reasonable money from TGP2. Now I know that at that time TGP2 was often treated like the village idiot. It was tolerated but most people were sure that it would never amount to much – and they have been proven to be correct.

However, there is a fairly strong independent streak in me so I was prepared to give TGP2 a go and at one stage I was submitting up to 5 galleries a day and getting a reasonable return on my investment. TGP2 was always big on search engine traffic – not that any of the lists ever got much search engine traffic – but they were always talking about it so I made a special effort to optimize each and every gallery I built.

At the time I saw no reward for my effort and I never saw a search engine appear in the referrers list in my stats but I kept plugging on, optimizing every gallery, because more experienced webmasters said I should.

Twelve months later, one of my TGP2 galleries that has not seen a hit in weeks has begun to get an average of 100 hits from various search engines every day and several others are also beginning to attract search engine traffic as well.

I know it is wishful thinking to hope that this traffic will remain constant; it is more likely that it will ebb and flow. While it is flowing I intend to take advantage of it. The gallery has fallen off all of the TGP2 gallery lists so a simple change to one of the advertisements directing the surfers to similar sites behind a free AVS might produce some worthwhile results.

Now that I have been taught the optimizing lesson in such a positive way you can bet that I will be more than willing to optimize every page that goes up to my server.

Optimizing for search engines should be worked into the site right from the first steps in site or gallery construction, not as an after-thought. Even before you start building the site you should have the name for the site chosen and that name should include a good search term for the particular niche you're site is focused on. Make sure the title of the site is at the top of the page and is in a large font size – H1 is the best choice.

Include some search engine text right at the top of the page. Don't give away important advertising space on your page in an attempt to impress search engine spiders. Instead use text ads that include key words and phrases that will attract search engine terms. Google will often use your first line or so of text as a site description so make sure that it contains the keywords/phrases you are targeting.

Google is the most influential search engine on the planet so read all you can about Google. There are many myths about Google so the best place to go is to Google itself. You will find information on Google that will help you understand how the Google spiders read a web page.

At first glance you may see that Google says that the only meta tag it reads is the title but don't be fooled into thinking that you can ignore the other meta tags. If Google should find that your page is graphic intensive it will go back and read your keyword and description tag.

Make sure you also add alt tags to every graphic that you have on the site. The search engines do read alt tags and while most assign a lesser relevancy to the words found in alt tags those words are still important.

Optimizing for search engines can be a real pain because it can slow you down. However, if you have the patience to optimize carefully, it certainly will pay off in the long run.