One way to add search engine crunchiness to your pages is to clean up the code. What you're looking to do is reduce the size of the .html output in source code and have it look "pretty". Making the code pretty can be considered writing a love letter to Google, after all, who are you trying to impress by cleaning code? If your page looks great and functions perfectly, you might not worry about sloppy or redundant code, but a little straightening up behind the scenes has proven to contribute to getting more traffic to that masterpiece you built.

Take out any unnecessary tags or attributes, especially if you use a WYSIWYG editor that adds extraneous tags or line breaks by default. Whitespace and line breaks all factor in, might not be much, but if your page is 400 hyperlinks long you can get some mileage out of tightening up a bit and making it look readable like a text document. FrontPage has a feature in html mode called "Reformat html", using it reformats the code text to the program defaults. Now, if you go into the "Page Options" and set it up to not do one thing and also do something else, like align right and remove tabs. Now use the reformat feature to make it the new, lower kilocalorie version. Take the opportunity to add those empty IMG ALT tags needed to validate code using the Markup Validation Service at W3.org. Also an easy guide to getting optimized code.

Proof in the pudding, or search soup as this case is. Most noticeable (30 to 40 position increase) were str82u.net, findpeoplefree.net and realfreesearches.net (.shtml pages). After reformatting large, messy individual pages, they showed immediate increases in not just targeted key phrase placement but gained numerous new ones. Reformatting the entire site showed increases to the overall traffic as well as raising the placement of the home pages themselves. All this is assuming you're using some sort of html pages, it's not always the case but has been the best choice for these sites for competing against giants in the niche. Going through the code by hand is the best if you want to tweak other SEO aspects like adding alt tags to images, tool tips for links and heading (h1, h2, h3 etc,) tags.

If you are using a CMS or other template type setups, don't forget to back up a copy of the files you play with, especially if you go with the slash and burn method of optimization. The template to this site has/had bits of functions that aren't used embedded, but those and a few other modifications (deletions) brought the size down a few kb.

Also:
● Starting with stripped down code was a let down, but those sites are gaining popularity in time.
● The easy way to check a page's size is to right click the page, choose properties and see the size
● Using style sheets have become more useful to this end by eliminating long strings repetative code.
● Affiliate code can be full of the advertiser's styles or conflicting attributes. If allowed, break it down to the basics then build it up to fit your format.