20 Important Tips about SEO

1. Keyword research:

This is vital for setting up content groups on your site. Knowing what actual phrases users are actually searching on allows you to use the most appropriate keyword or phrase within relevant content on your site.

2. Build content:

Might seem obvious, this part, but it’s important you spend the time to build useful, unique, content about your topic. Copying & pasting content from other sites could get your pages flagged as duplicate content and might land yu in legal hot water due to copyright . Try to build about 100 actual, content rich pages to launch your site with. More or less pages is fine. Each page should contain 200 plus words.

3. Mind your metas:

While only the DO NOT stuff keyword in there, be factual and make sure each individual page has a dedicated tag assigned - in short, don’t use one set of tags across your whole site.

4. The actual pages:

Make sure you use proper coding, don’t try to hide text thorugh matching colors of text to background and keep the file sizes down - under 20K is good. Don’t go crazy with javascript navigation, etc. - keep it simple: the spiders will be able to crawl it & index it and your users will love it.

5. Images & Alt Tags:

Cover this base - if you use an image on your site, take the 15 seconds to put in the tag which describes what the image is about - be factual, use a relevant keyword or phrase in there, and keep it short. DO NOT stuff this with keywords.


6. IP Address:

Get yourself a dedicated IP address. You can use shared hosting, but make sure you have a dedicated IP addy.

7. WWW v. Non-WWW:

Get this point sorted. When you type in http://domain.com, it should redirect you to the http://www.domain.com version of the domain. You should use the 301 redirect protocal to accomplish this. Should you be on a server running Windows, the process will vary, but the reuslts should be the same. Many hosted solution providers WILL NOT make this adjustment on the server for you, so be aware of this - it’s important.

8. Keyword density:

Don’t sweat this - just make sure you use the keyword in the title of the page, again in the title of the content (use

9. Keywords in URLs:

Again, don’t sweat this point - if you can, great. So long as using the keyword makes sense and is related to the actual content of the page. This doesn’t really make or break rankings, though, so don’t beat yourself up here.

10. Hyphen, underscore or dot:

When you have a keyword phrase (multiple words) being used in a URL, you’ll have to decide how to introduce a space between the words. Some folks recommend leaving them together, no spaces. I prefer to use the hyphen ( - ) or the dot ( . ) to separate words. Don’t use the underscore ( _ ).

11. Inbound links:

Once and for all - the only links of any real value to your rankings will be one-way inbound links from sites with similar topics. Reciprocal links (and all versions thereof, such as triangular link schemes, etc.) are next to useless. The engines discount any value from these. In fact, your first thought when linking should be to provide useful resources for your users and to obtain inbound links which may provide traffic to you. You’ll want to persue one-way inbound links here, too, but be warned - it’s tough. Quality counts, quantity doesn’t. Watch who is linking to you like a hawk. Bad link neighbors can cause you to get a black eye from the spiders, too. If you are actively policing your link strategy, as you should be, you’ll see problems coming and be able to take action. Did I mention quality counts and quantity doesn’t?

12. Directories:

Pay for Yahoo if you’ve got the $300. Submit to DMOZ and forget about it for at least 6 months. There are lots of other directories, but research them carefully. Lots of junk directories have come around lately - you want a directory which simply allows you to put your data in and provides one link back to you. Watch for directories which promise to put your link “across their network” or for submission tools which promise to submit to hundreds of directories each month. Both should be avoided.

13. Analytics:

Don’t use a hit counter - get actual analytics which will allow you to see where folks are coming from and what search terms they’re using to find you.

14. Sitemaps:

Make sure a simple, html, sitemap is avilable from your main page - spiders love these and it’s an easy way for them to quickly index all the pages of your site - you want this.

15. Spam tricks:

Let’s be honest here - if you have to ask if it’s a spammy tactic, it is. Don’t try to split hairs - spamming is spamming. You will either get caught by the engines themsleves and cease to exist in the index, or someone will report you (I would) and you’ll cease to exist in the index.

16. Chasing Page Rank:

OK, get over this NOW. First off, the PR value you see in the toolbar is roughly 3 - 4 months old - Google’s not using the data you’re seeing to rank your site, so why do YOU care about it? “But you want high PR sites linking to you, right?” - What you really want linking to you are sites which have similar topical content to your own. PR is irrelevant. Topic is relevant.

17. Validate your code:

Spiders like clean and simple. Show them code which is broken, dead links and stray tags and they’ll get the idea you’re not serious about this. Validate your code, page by page, and take the time to correct any errors the reports show you.

18. Keep building more pages:

The old article suggested “build one page of new content per day”. I still like Brett’s idea here, though I prefer to invest a weekend and create a bunch at a time - personal preference - just remember to follow the basics for each page.

19. Optimization/Submission software:

Humans optimize, software either spams, or goes out of data with it’s info. Seriously, software which claims to be able to optimize your website, simply cannot - it cannot make the changes, it does not read up the latest news and it does not go to the conferences and speak with the engineers from the engines. It can give you numbers, and construct tags for you, but after readin this far on this page, you can do this on your own. As for submitting your site, well, here’s the biggest clue to look for: if the software claims to submit to the engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., it’s bogus. You DO NOT submit to engines, you get links form other sites and spiders find you by crawling those links. As for submitting to directories, automated submission software often does not follow the rules as outlined by the engines. In many cases, due to image-based passwords designed to stop automated scripts, software tools are useless. Submit only by hand, and only to useful directories. The bottom line is software doesn’t optimize, humans do.

20. Paying for services:

This is a plug for all of us who do this for a living. It’s not rocket science, I’ll grant you, but if you don’t know what you’re doing and need a helping hand, shop around. Some charge hundreds for advice, some charge tens of thousands. Some use spam tricks, others (like me) don’t. Ask for references and call them.


This Article is written By Brett_Tabke:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/2010.htm

Tips in Image Search in the SEO Picture

One of the major trends that emerged from SES San Jose is the increasingly important role of image search. This article will talk a bit about how and why it's growing, and strategies for optimizing your web site to receive this type of traffic.

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., August 20-23, 2007.

First let's start with a few data points that illustrate why image search is increasing in importance:

1. In his keynote interview with Chris Sherman on Tuesday morning, Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, said that 50 percent of the results they provide on Ask3D do not come from traditional web results. Note that my own examination of this shows that there are still 10 blue links, but there are also image results, news results, and other relevant data provided in addition.

2. In the Image Search session, Shari Thurow stated that 15 percent to 16 percent of web searches are for images. This is just a stunning number!

3. Shari Thurow also offered up the data point that usability testing shows that users are more likely to click on an image link than a text link. As experienced SEOs know that means you lost the anchor text opportunity with that link, but you can easily address that by putting the pretty image links up top, and having a general purpose menu in the footer of your page using text links.

4. From an examination of sites I monitor, Google Image Search has become a steadily more important referrer, and often is one of the top 5 referrers. This is true even on sites that are not really that image-centric.

One of the major things that is driving this is the advent of universal/federated/blended search results. The integration of images into the web search results in a more integral way is providing greatly increased access to the available image data. In addition, more and more people are becoming aware of just how rich image search has become. People are getting high quality results, so conducting an image search becomes a natural reaction of more searchers when the need arises.
Image Search Optimization

So now that we know that image search represents a significant opportunity, I will now draw on the rest of my SES San Jose 2007 notes related to image search and lay out the basics of image search optimization.

As an obvious first step, figure out how images can and should fit into the user experience on your site. This is a non-trivial step. Then, determine how and where you can obtain original images for your site. Image search engines don't like duplicate content any more than web search engines, so you need to obtain your own original images. Once you have this in place, here are the major steps you can take to optimize for image search engines:

1. Use keywords in the alt tag attribute. This is a critical step, as it is the one best opportunities you have to unambiguously label the image. Bear in mind that there is a huge amount of search volume that includes words like: photo, picture, image, pics, pix, or locations. Regarding the locations, if your image is a picture of a physical location, include some location information in the alt tag attribute.

2. Note that the title tag attribute is usually ignored. Don't waste your time on it.

3. Pick a logical file name, that reinforces the keywords. Using hyphens in the file name to isolate the words in the keyword is an OK to thing, just try not to exceed two hyphens. Do not use underscores as a word separator.

4. Use a descriptive file name, in a similar fashion to the alt tag attribute.

5. Pay attention to the file extension too. For example, if the image search engine sees a ".jpg" (JPEG) file extension, it's going to assume that the file is a photo.

6. Basic web page optimization applies too. For example:
* The title tag of the web page
* The text nearby the image
* The overall theme of the content of the page
* The overall theme of the site (or section of the site)

7. Also important is to get links to the page with the image on it. This could become an entire link building discussion in itself, but one simple way to do this it to post the pages with images on them to del.icio.us.

8. Avoid duplicate content on your site. If for example, you have a thumbnail, a medium size image, and a full size image, you don't want these to all be indexed. The best way to handle this is to use robots.txt to prevent the crawler from looking at the versions you don't want indexed (most likely this would be the thumbnail or the full size image).

A couple of other interesting points emerges from the discussion. One of these was brought up by Liana Evans, which was that reputation management issues apply to image search as much as it does to web search. You should be aware of what pictures are out there of you, your brand, or your company, and you should actively work on making sure that the most common results that come up are pictures that fit the image you are trying to create.

In addition, image theft is a real issue, and is hard to stop. One thing you can do is to place some text in the image, such as "photo by ..." of "image by ...". While this does not stop photo theft altogether, it does require the person taking the image to do some editing to the image before they can use it.

In summary, image search can bring great results for your business. Of course, you want to make sure that the traffic you get is relevant to your site, and that those visitors might ultimately do what you want them to do on your site. With that in mind, step back and take a look at how optimizing for image search might fit into your overall web strategy.

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide.

6 Simple Steps To Image Optimization

With the advent of Google Universal Search, Ask 3D and other "blended" search services, images will increasingly be appearing in search results.

If you're not optimizing images on your web site, you're missing out on capturing some of this increasingly valuable real-estate. Not sure how to optimize images for search engines? Today's Search Illustrated shows you how to do it simply and quickly:

19 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Site Using Google Images

One way to get more search engine traffic is to optimize your website for Google Image Search, a tool which allows users to easily find images by typing in specific search terms, phrases and keywords.

Many people utilize Google Image search to find images for a wide variety of topics, which can range from pictures of cars to celebrities and furniture.

Images can not only make your website visually attractive: they can help you to gain more daily search engine traffic.

Highly relevant image results show up at the top of Google’s search results page when one searches for specific topics. Getting listed in this prime position can possibly send a great deal of traffic to your website.

Introduction to Google Image Search Optimization

Google Image Search optimization is not a difficult process and only requires that you pay attention to how you label and use your images within the regular framework of your website. A lot of image optimization involves basic search optimization factors such as the inclusion of relevant keywords in the content, title and meta tags.

All of the articles I’ve read on the topic of Google Images optimization seem to be in common agreement and they offer similar suggestions, although a few of them do highlight some different methods of utilizing Google Image Search.

19 Ways to Get More Traffic Using Google Image Search

I’ve made a full list of all the methods I’ve come across so that all of you can have an accessible reference point, should you decide to use Google Images as a method to drive more traffic to your website.

Also added are a few points of my own, specifically dealing with how targeting specific image topics and integrating them within your webpages can help to attract a great deal more traffic through Google images.

Depending on your niche and images used, you’ll be able to attract a great deal of extra visitors easily with very little additional work. I highly recommending putting at least a few of these points into practice on your own website.

Here is the list of Google image optimization tips in full:

1. Insert keywords into your Alt Text.

This is the most important part of image optimization and you should include a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the image and your webpage. The alt text should be inserted in the code for your image file.

Here’s an example: Alt description goes here">

2. Name your Images with Descriptive Titles.

If you have an image of Lindsay Lohan, you could use the term ‘lindsay-lohan.jpg’ to name your image, instead of simply going with the original file name which could be something like ‘b473.jpg’. I usually name my images exactly the same way as my alt text.

3. Use relevant text around your images.

It is recommended that descriptive text with your targeted keywords be placed immediately before or after the image itself. If you do a search for any term on Google Image, you’ll find that a short description of 20+ characters beneath every image. You’ll probably notice that the keyword is listed in bold as well.

4. Use Adsense to assess overall content relevance.

Insert an Adsense unit on the page where your googe images are placed and see what type of Adsense ads show up. This will tell you how Google thinks the overall theme of what your page is about.

Change your content until the Adsense units reflect the keywords you want to target. In my opinion, this is not only applies to Google images but is a generally helpful method as it improves your overall latent semantic indexing score and makes your site appear more relevant to Google for targeted key phrases or words.

5. Optimize Your Title and Meta tags.

This should already be part of your overall optimization strategy and it purportedly helps your site to rank better in image searches as well. Like the use of Adsense for testing, paying attention to this point will help you to have better visibility in Google’s main search engine as well.

6. Use anchor text keywords in links to images.

When you link to a specific image, use keywords instead of a generic phrase. For example, instead of using “See here” or “Click for Full Size“, try something like “Lindsay Lohan Picture” or “Lindsay Lohan in Rehab“.

7. Use Internal and Social Site Tags for your Images

If you are using images with little or no textual content, it might be helpful to tag your images using internal tagging functions or social tags like Technorati. This may add more weight to your image and help it to rank better. If you are uploading your images using Flickr, remember to use the appropriate keyword tags as well.

8. Use Broad Categories of Images to Get a Larger Audience

If you’re running a gadget website, you don’t have to only upload pictures of gadgets. Try upload pictures of web 2.0 sites, web applications and pictures of items related to your gadgets. For example, you can upload pictures of living rooms instead, if the gadget was designed to complement residential space.

9. Make Your Image folder accessible to search engines

Ensure that your robots.txt file does not limit search engines from accessing your image files. This is essential if you want your images to be ranked on Google Image Search. Try not to use javascript links on image files as well as it will limit search engine access as well.

10. Re-upload your pictures to maintain search freshness

If you have a picture that focuses on highly popular keywords, you can try to remove and re-upload another version of your image because freshness might affect relevancy and may rejuvenate your ranking on the Google Image Search engine.

11. Make your Google Images Standards-compliant.

One way of making your images fully standards complaint requires you to include not only the alt tag but also the width, height and title tag for the image as well. Here’s an example of a fully compliant image reference you can follow.

12. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Central.

Visit Google Webmaster Tools and click on the Diagnostic tab on the menu bar. After which, select enhanced image search on the left sidebar and click on the checkbox to opt into image search for your website. This can only be done after you verify your website with Google so do that before proceeding further.

13. Try out Google Image Labeler.

Apparently, the Google Image Labeler is some sort of a online game which allows you and others to write tags for images that show up. These tags are then taken into consideration and may influence the Google Image search results.

14. Use Javascript to prevent framing of your webpages

By adding a piece of javascript code, you can prevent your images from being framed when users click on the image within Google Image Search. Visitors will not see the Google image frame but the full site and this may encourage more pageviews for your site as well. This practice may not entirely be endorsed by Google so try at your own risk.

15. HotLink Images from Google Search

This involves going to Google Image Search and to do a search query for the image you want. Visit the original webpage and copy the image location to hotlink it on your own website. This helps your website to show up high among the image search ranks. For an example, check out these search results for Jessica Alba (slightly NSFW).

Most of the images in the top row are hotlinked and actually rank better than the original image source. You should probably note that hotlinking is frowned upon by most webmasters because it leeches their bandwidth, not to mention that you might be violating copyrights as well.

An alternative method of hotlinking is to hotlink Google’s cache itself. This short tutorial gives clear indication of how to do it but this method only allows you to use thumbnails, not to mention that some webmasters have reported seeing no results after trying this method.

16. Use Image Sizing to Target a Search Term.

The size of your image may determine the amount of visits you receive from Google Image Search. Some people use Google Image to search for wallpapers and if you’re targeting a specific keyword, try creating it in the form of a wallpaper or in the form of an icon, depending on how much competition there is for the specific image.

17. Use Images about ‘Hot’ Topics.

One easy way to get more visitors from Google images involves the deliberate use of images to catch visitors who are searching for ‘hot’ topics, some of which can be easily found through the use of Google Trends. For example, screenshots of popular ongoing TV shows could be integrated in some way in some webpages. Note that for maximum effect, your content should be relevant to the image used as well.

18. Create a separate page and link to the page and image

This process involves adding an optimized page webpage on your website along and link the image to that specific page which visitors can access via the ‘back’ anchor on the new page whenever they find your page through Google Image Search.

I have not personally tried this but some have claimed that it helps both the regular search rank as well as the Image Search rank. See this page for the method in full.

19. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed

An important part of Google Image Search optimization is to monitor how many images on your website are indexed by Google Image Search to see if you are taking the right steps to optimize your images.

The easiest way to do this is to use a site search operator. For example, here is a list of images indexed on Boing Boing. Simply change boingboing.net to your url: http://images.google.com/images?q=site:boingboing.net

Converting Google Image Search Visitors

Getting traffic from Google Image Search is very nice but you’ll need some way of converting them into a customer or future reader. This can be quite difficult because visitors are likely to click away if after they find the image.

Here are some conversion tactics you can use:

• Place your image on a webpage with highly relevant content
• Link to other relevant webpages and image galleries
• Promote a special offer related to the product image that you’ve used
• Allow users to copy the image and paste it on their website (try this script)
• Include call to actions at the start and end of webpages

Try Experimenting with Google Image Search..

I’ve recently gotten a decent number of hits for a image which was experiencing seasonal surge in search queries for a specific term and I’m sure that the list of tips above will help you to get some extra traffic from Google Images as well.

You can start by first trying out a few images in your webpages or new blog posts to see if you actually get some traffic from it. Remember to monitor traffic through your stats package and tweak for optimum results.