Alternative Image Tag - When inserting images to a web page you have the option of providing what is referred to as a "alt image tag". The majority of site builders don't bother executing this option. But it is simple to do, so it only makes sense to do it.

Below is a screenshot of a Google search "basketball hoops". Take note of the link at the end of the arrow. It reads IMAGES. When the searcher clicks on that link, they will be shown the page in the second image.

Once the link to the image page is clicked this page below is shown. You can't see it in the screenshot, but each image has a live link underneath of it that will take the web searcher to the website where the image is located.

What this means for you is additional traffic. I personally use the image search function regularly and many others do as well. It is doubtful that you will see a major flow of traffic but every little bit helps. It's really just a matter of putting your site images to work for you in the search engines.

H1 Tag - The H1 tag is meant to assign a title to the text body of your webpage. There is now debate in the SEO circles as to whether or not this procedure still improves SEO rankings.

It's easiest to just think of the H1 tag as the headline to your body of text. An example of an H1 tag is shown below.

The idea is to use your keywords in the H1 tag. The use of the H1 tag is decreasing simply because of some of the platforms being used to build web pages. Some of these shopping cart type of platforms/scripts simply do not include the H1 tag built in as an option.

Often times such as on this website, the headline of the text body is an image opposed to actual text. For example, the headline at the top of this page that reads "SEO Strategies" is a jpeg image.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) - LSI is a term used to describe a theoretical process in which a search engine determines the subject of a webpage based on the commonality of keywords within the text.

When you think of LSI think in the way of similar terms having to do with your main keyword phrase. Google likes to see other words on your site that relate to your keywords. So if your keyword is "basketball hoops", then it would make sense that the same page / site might also contain words such as "basketball netting", "basketballs", adjustable "basketball hoop" etc.

If you use the Google keyword tool, you can simply look through the results of your keyword research for words that Google thinks relate to your chosen keyword phrase. Use those words throughout your site for bonus points from big G.

Inter-site Linking - You should be linking your site internally. Not only should you link to all of the internal pages from your main page, but you should be linking internal pages to each other. Simple as that. If you look to the bottom of this page, (which would be considered an internal page of this site), you will see links to other internal pages within this site. Internal pages are all the pages on your site except the main page (index.html).

Site Map - This is a webpage that is mainly used to show the search engine crawler robots where to find the pages on your site that you want to be indexed within their system.

Yes the search engines actually have little robot scripts that go out and scour the web for content to index into their systems. When the robot arrives at your site it may or may not land on your main page.

The idea is to have all of your pages linked to each other in one way or another so that these robots will find all of the pages you want indexed. A site map is an easy way to do this.

It can be a simple html document that lists all the pages of your site and links to each of them. Then just make sure you provide a link on each one of your pages that leads to the site map. Then no matter which one of your pages the crawler bots land on, they will have a roadmap of your site. Indexing refers to a particular search engine finding your page and adding it to their system to show in their results.

This will conclude the basics of on-page optimization. We'll discuss the methods of off-page optimization on the next page.

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