Straight from the head of Google’s Web Spam team, Matt Cutts discusses in this video the proper way of using the IMG TAG with ALT and TITLE attributes.
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You’ve rolled out the Web site marketing strategy map on your war room table. You are pondering how successful you’ve been against the enemy. You’re confident that your Web site is helping you to win the battle against your competition, but how can you tell if your site – and search engine optimization results — are winning the war?
Since you are trying to measure the success of your SEO campaign, you need to pay attention to how your natural search engine traffic is improving. This fact means you need to look at the referrer domain data from Google.com, Yahoo.com, and any other search engine domains you are targeting. Any other metrics, like overall page views and visits, are meaningless unless they are tied into the referrer domain.
Keeping track of the keywords that drive traffic to your site can give you a heads up on what keywords you should be targeting. Sometimes a visitor will arrive at your site through a search term that you did not intentionally target. By paying attention to your web analytics, you can capitalize on SEO opportunities you may have missed.
Many Webmasters believe that Google Analytics is the best thing to happen to the Internet marketing industry since pay per click was introduced. The service is free, feature rich, and it’s a powerful tool that means you have no reason not to start using web analytics. Providing this free service helps the industry tremendously. Web analytics tools are necessary.
The bottom line is that Google Analytics is a powerful piece of software when used properly, and comes at an affordable price – free! The goal for Google is of course to increase AdWords spending; a goal many of today’s enhancements will help them to achieve.
Are you laying the groundwork with a designer to develop a new Web site for your company? Here’s a suggestion: ask the designer to use flash items sparingly. Granted most designers find animation and graphics to be an integral part of a nice looking Web site, but an overabundance of flash can hinder your site’s search engine optimization efforts.
You just can’t imagine what a disadvantage flash is with search engines – it is a top rankings killer! Although search engines are being able to index content inside a flash animation, keep your important information away from flash animation. A search engine may simply ignore the animation altogether.
Further complicating matters is the fact that your visitors may not be able to view your flash content. Your site must make accommodations to provide alternative content for when flash does not load properly. Other problems may arise as a result of using flash. Visitors will use their Web browser back button when viewing a flash animation to try to return to the Home page, but this process reloads the entire animation. There are many usability problems like this. A designer needs to keep these in mind when building a flash interface.
Ideally, your site content should open within 15 seconds. While flash can do a lot for your Web site’s presentation, from the SEO point of view it should be used sparingly – or not at all. If you must use flash, use it only on non-crucial content pages (http://www.blue2.com/art-03.htm).
How much weight do title tags carry among the search engine result pages (SERP) that you’re trying to capture? Plenty according to most Web site development experts. This reason is why you need to pay close attention to the words that appear in the title tag – and the order in which they appear. It is extremely important that you develop a crisply worded title tag that includes your most relevant keyword phrases and performs the function of announcing the summary of your Web page content.
Title tags carry hefty algorithmic hefty weight when it comes to search engines. Title tags are equally important as your visible text copy and the links pointing to your pages. You should definitely incorporate the name of your company in the title tag. If your company’s name is well known, it is essential that you include it in the title tag. The title tag gives you a great opportunity to further market your company and its brands.
The title tag has been and will continue to be one of the most important elements in search engine rankings. Title tags are the over-arching descriptors for the page; they communicate with the search engines telling them what each page is about. Don’t overlook your title tags. Their importance simply can’t be denied.
Looking to steer more traffic to your Web site? The key to motoring your success up the search engine ladder is in your keywords. Keywords are the function that drive search engines, and the most important keywords are what lead customers to your site. Once you’ve developed your site and understand which keywords are most important to you, it’s time to write the content for your site. You probably know that by repeating the keywords you can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) status. The frequency of which the keywords are repeated is commonly referred to as the keyword density.
Keyword density essentially is the ratio of the word that is being searched for against the total number of words appearing on a given Web page. If your keyword occurs only two or three times on a page of 500 or more words, it stands to reason that it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that would occur 10 times on a page of similar length.
Keyword placement on the page, and their density on the page, are two important areas where keywords are felt on your Web page. The choice of which keywords to target on a page is often of vital importance, especially for highly competitive keywords.
Your choice of keywords – and their density — is the primary reason people will discover your Web site. Customers are led to your Web site through their searches for information. With this thought in mind, it becomes vitally important that your site offers as many opportunities to be included in those search results as possible.
There is no magic formula or guarantee for success behind keyword density. Just remember that no keywords translates to no placement among the search engine results page.
You’ve developed your laundry list of your Web hosting needs. Now how do you go about finding a company that provides fast, reliable service that benefits your Web site? Search engines like Google want some assurance that your Web site is always going to have a strong presence – and not be a site that is accessible 50 percent of the time. A good hosting service will give you that presence.
If your server is not guaranteed to be up 99.9 percent of the time, there is a good chance your site will be down when a spider or editor visits your pages. If your site is not viewable, it will be detrimental to your rankings. If you do not have 24/7 access to your files, this will eventually slow the optimization process of your site.
Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to the home page of a particular domain. The home page of a domain will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page . When you use some of the free hosting services, your index.html page is the home page of your site, but not of that domain. Therefore, in these search engines, your site will find it very difficult to make it to the top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for some of the really competitive keywords. Just think of the amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens. See why you need reliable hosting?
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Web hosting is one of the not-so-obvious items that can make or break a Web business (http://www.seofirm.biz/resourceswebhosting.htm). If your web hosting service has poor reliability and your Web site is down when the search engine robots visit your site, this will adversely affect visitors seeking your products and services and your search engine rankings. If a robot cannot spider your site, it will not be indexed.
If your in the market for a reliable host, contact ATX for Hosting Services.
When a web designer goes about developing a new website, he or she usually focuses on two aspects: functionality and appearance. Since text usually isn’t very appealing, images are often used to make a website more pleasing to the eyes. However, the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words.” does not apply to search engines. A search engine only understands text. Therefore, the question becomes, how can I create a fully optimized site, but still use images?
The first thing that you can do is make sure that everything that can be expressed in text is expressed in text. Often times, images actually contain text. One popular example of this is the use of navigation links on a website. Text could easily be used instead of images. This may raise the question: Why would I want to use more text if you just said that is was less appealing? Well, there are ways to make text seem like images. A perfect example is that of Ameritrade. The green links across the top of the page appear to be images, but are actually text contained within a background image, thus helping to optimize the homepage.
Another idea for optimizing you website is using alt and title elements whenever you use the img tag. Taking advantage of the alt element allows you to optimize your images for search engines. Essentially, what you are doing is telling the search engine what the image is, through the use of text. alt text is intended to be used instead of an image, not to provide additional information. To be used effectively, it should be limited to 3 keywords at most. The title element also allows you to assign text to an image. However, the text assigned should provide supplemental information, not explain what the image is. The title element allows users to bring their mouse over an image and get extended information about an image that may not be shown.
Image without alt and title elements
<img src=”dog.jpg” width=”200″ height=”150″>
Image with alt and title elements
<img src=”dog.jpg” width=”200″ height=”150″ alt=”Dog Jumping” title=”This friendly Labrador is great with kids.”>
The very first question you need to ask yourself before you start any marketing campaign is, “Who’s going to buy my product or service?” or “Who is my target audience?” A target audience can be people of a certain age group, gender, marital status, etc. (for example: teenagers, females, single people, etc.) A certain combination, like men from twenty to thirty is often a target audience.
Okay. So I’ve picked my target audience. How does choosing the right target audience relate to Search Engine Optimization?
By choosing the right target audience, not only will you be able to choose a web design which appeals to that group, but you will also be able to pick the right keywords and write content which appeals to that demographic.
Let’s say I have a client with a new brand of beer called “Man Beer.” My target audience would be Men ages 21 and over. Would I have a pink web site with a flowered border? Would I write content that talks about how beer shortens the length of menstrual cycles? Would my keyword phrase be “fabulous fruity drink”? - Of course not. You may be able to get top rankings with the keywords and phrases you select, but bringing the wrong target audience to your web site won’t get you much business.