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I was scanning a well-known search engine site today and of course a headline like 'Why Many Web 2.0 Developers Are Search Morons' was always going to catch my attention. If you've read my columns before you'll know that I'm not big on Web 2.0 but Steve and I do get very serious about search.

I've grumbled here before about the fact that so many Web 2.0 applications are completely non-friendly when it comes to search engines. So the article probably wasn't going to teach me anything I didn't already know ... but frank articles like that are always worth reading.

Sure enough as I wandered through the article I found myself nodding in agreement with just about every point that the author made but one thing really jumped off the page at me. Chris Silversmith, the guy who wrote the piece, quite rightly, pointed out that so many Web 2.0 developers are ignoring the need for search engine optimization in their applications.

By ignoring search engine optimization the developers are leaving money on the table and no one in their right mind wants to do that. I've often said that so many web developers simply aren't in touch with reality but these days I'm beginning to think that perhaps web developers aren't the only ones who are silly enough to leave money on the table.

Even in this industry there are so many people who are basically doing exactly what the 'moronic' web developers are doing and ignoring many of the various income streams that they should be tapping into. These days sales are not as easy to make as they once were and yet many adult webmasters are still only working one income stream simply because they think it's too time consuming or too hard to work all of the various streams.

Perhaps it's not so much that working all those streams is too hard or too time consuming. Perhaps that people in this industry are just too lazy to get out there and make the maximum amount of money out of every site and gallery that they produce. For example, I still see webmasters who are too lazy to add keyword rich titles to every page of a free site, there are many who don't add alt tags to their images and there are still gallery makers who don't worry about those things either.

If you're one of those people why aren't you taking the time to add a little search engine optimization to your website or gallery? Why aren't you taking the few moments of your time to add those features that will attract the search engines?

It's not impossible for your sites and galleries to rank well in the search engines. Almost certainly you're not going to be ranking well for one or even two word terms but it's quite possible to get there for three and four word terms and there are people out there who are using those multi-word terms to search for what they want.

And to optimize your sites or galleries for the those multi-word terms isn't going to take you hours. At the most it would add no more than 15 minutes to the time it takes to build a gallery or free site and just one sale from that work would more than pay for your time.

So why aren't you doing it? Why aren't you adding alt. text to every image? You don't have to be stupid about it and try and stuff each alt. tag with dozens of keywords, all it takes is just a short sentence that includes one of the keyword phrases that you're targeting for the site.

If you're building a gallery then you can repeat that sentence for several images but don't use the same piece of text for every alt. tag. If you vary them you'll have a chance to rank for several different terms instead of just one. Make sure that you include it for the header image too and don't forget to give your site or gallery a keyword rich title tag and a description that will attract people to your site or gallery too.

Of course you don't have to do any of that. You can go on working just the one income stream with your sites and galleries and slowly watch the amount of money you're earning grow smaller and smaller. Or you can knuckle down to the realities of life and make every effort to extract every last cent out of each gallery and site you produce.

It's you're choice, you can be a moron just like those Web 2.0 developers who don't think that search engines are important or you can take the time to attract the search engines and so stand the chance to make even more money. And isn't that why you're here ... to make money?