On-site search engine optimization is not the focus of this site but I thought I would discuss it a bit and link out to a few resources on the topic.

On-site SEO is not hugely important.  The main things to understand is that the search engines must be able to crawl your site.  Also the content of the site is important and the way you present that content is a factor in how search engines will rank your niche site.

Content is heavily pushed in the seo community but understand that search engines many times will place more emphasis on on-site seo and backlinks.  A great example of this is the amount of Wikipedia pages that rank at the top of search engine page results despite the fact that there is not anything on some pages.  The Wikipedia.org domain name carries tons of weight with Google because of how much authoratative content it has and because of the amazing job it does of linking internally.  Obviously Wikipedia is an extreme case but still noteworthy as the content on some of these pages is next to nothing.

There are also cases where there is no on-site seo or content but a page will still rank for a term.  Google gives tons of weight to .edu and .gov domain names to the point where any related words on an aged page from one of these domain extensions will rank extremely high.  A well anchored link from a site with one of these extensions can be priceless.

There is another awesome example of how backlinks dominate at Grizzly’s blog.  He talks about how Adobe is number one for the search term ‘Click Here‘ despite having nothing on that page that says anything about ‘click here.’  That page has so many links pointing to it that use the anchor text ‘click here’ that Google has decided it is the number one authority on that topic.

Despite those things it is still a good idea to practice good on-site seo so I will refer to an expert post by Randfish over at SEOMoz discussing perfect on-site optimization.