For music stations, trying to keep your website up to date with your playlist is both valuable and tough to keep up with. New artists may pop up every week, and keeping your website in sync with what's playing on air is time consuming. Of course, since your audio system and music scheduler are completely up to date with what you station is playing right now, the best case scenario would be for those programs to talk directly to your website and make updates automatically.

However, the prospect of writing a script to get that information and post it on your website in real time is well beyond the scope of this column as well as beyond the skills of almost all station and cluster webmasters. You could hire a programmer to write it for you - but that could cost at least thousands of dollars and require your overworked engineer to get involved. Or you could pay nothing, configure nothing and arrange nothing and have the people at YES.com do all that work for you - for free.

The long relationship between the music industry and the radio industry has been based on the knowledge that radio's ability to give exposure to artists was very beneficial to the music industry. The exposure to a larger fan base led to greater album and single sales as well as greater concert attendance and a host of other ancillary revenues. So much so, in fact, that the two industries have gotten into trouble with the law over labels and promoters paying to get more airplay. While the music industry benefits, so does radio by getting programming in the form of songs and using fans' relationships with artists to build relationships between stations and listeners.

What does this basic radio concept have to do with the internet? There are two things that are internet related here. First, the internet allows stations to let listeners get closer to artists and strengthen their brand in the process. Second, with the rise of affiliate programs, radio stations can now get a piece of the revenue generated by music sales - allowing radio to benefit from both sides of the equation.

Last week we looked at some basics of Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimzation is the practice of tweaking a website to make it appear higher in search results through Google, Yahoo and similar sites.

First, a little warning. Whenever you are optimizing your website, keep in mind that you are doing so to draw more traffic to your site. The end goal is to get more visitors - so don't make your site unfriendly to people just so you can make it friendly to the search engines. Your first goal should always be to make your site easy to navigate and informative or enjoyable.

Second, this week we'll look at on-page search engine optimization. This is the technique of formatting your web page content to be higher in search results. On-page optimization does not work broadly, like getting sites to link to yours or maintaining canonical URLs. Instead, it allows you to focus on particular keywords or phrases and increase your results for those particular phrases.

What's a good column without a bad pun for the title? Answer: a better column.

We're going to geek it up a bit this week and take a look at canonical URLs, subdomains and "PageRank". Those terms may be foreign to you, but if you want your site to show up near the top of search rankings, then you should get to know them.

These terms all fall under the broad umbrella of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is the practice of designing and developing your website so it will be seen higher on search rankings.

When you type a search term into Google or Yahoo, they return a list of web pages that that they believe are the most relevant to the terms you are looking for. By understanding how they do this, we can help set up your site to show up higher in the search results, and this draws more traffic. So before I explain how to create canonical URLs by eliminating subdomains so you can consolidate PageRank - or even what that means - let's look at how the search engines generate their listings.