Tag Archives: image

Why You Need to Stop Ignoring Image Alt Attributes

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This is a guest post by AJ Wilcox of OrangeSoda , an internet marketing and search marketing company that specializes in local search and SEO for small business. As you are coding your site, you most often get the necessary stuff in, and then sweep back for all the leftovers. Quite often, developers forget to add the alt=”” attribute to images because it’s not required to appear completed. Since image alts are not visible to the majority of searchers, they’re easy to forget. I’d like to cover why you shouldn’t forget about them, or why you should go input them now. Traffic from Image Searches How do you think Google classifies images in order to display in images.google.com when a searcher enters a keyword? A few options come to mind. They can pull the filename (ie. Bluecar.jpg will likely be relevant when someone searches for ‘blue car’), text surrounding the image, the alt text, and they can inspect the image digitally (their technology is improving fast). By including your page keywords in your alt text, you raise your chances of showing up in image searches, and getting subsequent visitors from those image searches. The Visually Impaired Users who are blind have browsers that read the page text aloud. When the browser comes to an image, if there is no alt text, the browser can’t add to the user’s experience. Visually impaired users should definitely be able to get the gist of images like the rest of us, so take a few minutes and write some descriptive alt text. Google Usability Love What is Google’s goal? They are first and foremost a business, so they want to make money. They make a good 98% of their money through paid ads. The more users on Google properties, the more chances that users will click their ads, and add to the bottom line. The better the experience that users have surfing sites through Google, the more they will return. Of course it makes sense for Google to reward complete, fully-usable content to hover near the top of their indexes. Rankings Keyword usage in image alt text is classified as having minimal importance by a consortium of SEO experts, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. It is yet another opportunity to declare your relevance to your given keyword. The little things add up to big things together, so don’t ignore them. Personally, I feel that image alt text plays a larger role than most on-site factors due to the previous point about usability, but that’s personal opinion. So there you have it, don’t forget your image alt text. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Why You Need to Stop Ignoring Image Alt

SEO for AJAX

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AJAX and SEO is a tricky topic – after all, an AJAX-based website is more or less the same as a FLASH website: it may look fancy but is non-navigatable. AJAX got its bad SEO reputation for a number of reasons, including: - crawling issues (you are risking not getting all of your content crawled) – indexing issues (you are risking not getting all of your content indexed) – broken website navigation and useless address bar (because all pages load under the same URL) – useless back/next/reload buttons – potential cloaking issues – which may be unintentional – where the user sees different content than the crawler Here’s the difference in what the crawler can see without AJAX and can’t see with AJAX*: *KUDO’s to Google for the image: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc75gmks_120cjkt2chf Yet AJAX can and should be search engine friendly and following these simple best practices will get you there (or at least much closer to where you should be): 1) Decide where your website ends and your application starts: it does not make sense to make spiders crawl your drafts, but the documents made public and archived instead 2) Make sure you have a URL for each “page” you want to get crawled and indexed 3) Load the basic content containing the keywords at the beginning in a non-dynamic way 4) Cache dynamic pages and serve them as static ones, you could even take snapshots of “pages” which content changes all the time and publish the snapshots 5) Menu items, links and other crucial structural aspects of a site should work without AJAX and/or JavaScript 6) Do not use AJAX for effects but for extra functionality that truly enhances the user experience Some additional tips: AJAX should be used for what it’s designed for – dynamic interaction of the current page with the server (for instance, if you need to submit a form, upload a picture without reloading page, or updating a widget (i.e. calendar)). Most people trigger their basic AJAX through “onClick” events on a given element. In this case the spider will not floor to the AJAX generated content. Another way to do it is using a regular anchor tag (

13ddbbd8d81 0017.jpg 150x90 SEO for AJAX

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SEO for AJAX

Add Image Links to Your Arsenal

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In the pursuit of new inbound links, people don’t always seek out new image links. We’ve been so conditioned to go after good editorial links that image links may be the last things on our minds as we reach out and try to increase traffic (and, let’s be honest, rankings) for our sites. However, there are several reasons why you should start paying more attention to image links. They’re part of a natural link profile. Chances are that if you’ve never pursued image links but you check your external backlinks, you’ll find that you have more image links than you thought. Actually, I tried very hard to find websites that did not have any image links, and it was quite a chore. For more information on how to optimize your images for SEO, see Ann Smarty’s article . They’re good for traffic because they’re more noticeable. On certain web pages, I’d argue that an image link might be better than a text link, actually. Based on user eyetracking patterns, an image in the F-shaped reading pattern is going to have a much better shot at generating traffic than a text link at the end of the content. They can pass link juice. It might not be as much as a text link passes (and it probably shouldn’t, considering its origins and intended uses), but it’s still something. They give off a warm, fuzzy vibe. Try and find a few image links that are used to link to something that the site owner hates. It’s tough to do. Almost everyone uses text links to funnel their negativity. They can be optimized through keywords. Just as a hyperlink has anchor text, an image link has an alt (alternate text) attribute. If you used a screen reader, your browser did not load the image, or you were using a text-only browser, this would give the user a description of the image. Although it’s a great way to get your keywords in, it’s also ripe for abuse, unfortunately. While a long description may make more sense to a visually impaired user using a screen reader, if that tactic is overdone, it can definitely seem spammy. They show up in image search results. Many site owners report that a great deal of their traffic comes from Google images, so it’s nothing to scoff at, if you’re the scoffing type. They can be fantastic ways to build even more links. Images, especially really funny ones, have the potential to go viral. Remember the squirrel crasher that popped up all over the place? That wouldn’t have been such a success if it had been a piece of text. Reading about a squirrel husting into a wedding photo is slightly funny, but seeing it is freaking hysterical! Even though not everyone who created and posted their own squirrelized photos linked to the original site through their own new images, tons of them linked to it through text and pimped it using social media. Naturally there are downsides to image links, and images in general. They take more time to load than text does, which can annoy users enough to simply leave the site and never return. They may be confused for the more spammy ads that appear all over the web, causing users to ignore them or discount them. However, most people wouldn’t intentionally seek out a “Click here” link either, but it’s part of a typical organic link profile, just like image links are. Julie Joyce owns the link development agency Link Fish Media , is one of SEO Chicks, and contributes to Search Engine Land and Search Marketing Gurus . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Add Image Links to Your

W3C Validation for SEO – Myth and Reality

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A topic that has been discussed extensively by some people in the SEO community is the notion that having a W3C compliant web site is either critical to SEO or it’s not.  Most recently, Edward Lewis and I debated back and forth on Twitter, with Edward holding firm to his long-standing position that compliance is necessary and me taking the stand that 100% compliance is not necessarily a factor in ranking. This latest back and forth was prompted by a tweet I posted while listening to Matt Cutts being interviewed by WebProNews during SMX West.  In that tweet, I summed up what Matt had said regarding SEO and having a site that passes code validation.   My tweet stated : W3C compliance is NOT an SEO factor to Google #MattCuttsQuote #SMX Edward then followed up to our Twitter conversation on this by writing a very lengthy and quite detailed article backing up his position on the matter.  I’ll leave it up to you to take the time to read that article yourselves.   And here, I would like to speak to my own position and the logic behind it. How Much Compliance Is Important? If the goal is to ensure that a client site has the best possible chance at it’s highest organic rankings, then we need to acknowledge that even just factoring in Google, there are about 200 indicators to consider.  Now, I don’t know about you, but here’s the reality.  With 200 factors to consider, I also have just as much of a responsibility to my clients to focus on those factors that I believe will yield the most results for the investment of time and resources. Because of this, I do not check client web sites for 100% W3C compliance as part of my audits.  Even though having a site 100% compliant with W3C standards is a best practice concept, I am not a web developer.  And I have not been hired to ensure that W3C compliance is being met in every way possible. So if a page has an opening paragraph tag without it’s subsequent closing tag, I don’t ultimately care as much to document such findings. Sure, it might only take me a few minutes to run compliance tests.  But as Edward is so capable of doing, documenting a site’s shortcomings at that level could, potentially, just as easily take hours – if you’re going to include details on how to resolve those specific problems.  Multiply that by cross-browser testing work.  Because we all know perfectly well that not one single web browser truly complies 100% with W3C compliance either. So just because a site is 100% compliant doesn’t even mean it’s going to be properly displayed across web browsers.  And that means compliance isn’t so straight forward either. Maximized Return On Recommendations There are so many other fish to fry, that I need to use my time wisely.  Telling clients that their site is not properly validating due to some P tag problem might earn me a pat on the back for being thorough.  Yet if they fix that issue, I do not believe it’s going to have enough of a positive impact on their SEO as compared to them focusing on any one of the dozens of other action items I usually come up with that are direct SEO issues. Competitive Reality Here’s where the two camps differ.  In one camp, if a site is not 100% compliant, it’s not a truly optimized site.  In the other camp, if a site, when held up to the competitive landscape, is just as fast, and has just enough compliance aspects to get by, then an SEO focus is better spent on quality content depth, site architecture from a content topic relationship perspective, internal and external link depth and relationships. Limited Budgetary Resources How many clients do you have where the budget for web initiatives is unlimited? Maybe I don’t work with the right clients, because none of my clients has EVER fit that bill.  Instead, they’ve got specific budgetary parameters from within which they can work.  And if a 5,000 page site has to have its entire dynamically generated URL structure rebuilt from the ground up in order to address just the Page Title to URL relationship for SEO, I guarantee you that this task is infinitely more critical, being specific to SEO, than ensuring there’s a proper closing to a paragraph tag. No Disrespect Now this isn’t about disrespect to people who believe that strict W3C compliance is important.  Let’s face it – while most of us in the SEO industry know that we can make use of image alternate attributes, personally, I make sure I’m very careful in clarifying to clients that making use of them is first and foremost an issue of providing content to visually impaired people that helps them understand the purpose of an image they may not see.  With that caveat in place, I then go on to communicate how this is an opportunity for SEO because the search engines interpret images on a page to be one indicator as to the purpose of that page. So if I have to choose between instructing my clients to work on the alternate attributes of their site’s photos or alternately, making sure paragraph tags are closed, given those aforementioned budgetary limits, I’m always going to go with the one that’s going to help the search engines learn more about the page’s focus or purpose.  Whether a paragraph tag is closed or not does not help or hurt this either way. W3C Standards For SEO In addition to the image alternate attribute, there are several other HTML standard tags, that when properly used (in accordance with W3C guidelines for valid coding of web pages), are clearly SEO best practices as well. Whether it’s proper use of header tags, bolding, bullet point implementation, or any one of dozens upon dozens of elements to HTML, it’s clear that a site IS better off from an SEO perspective, when that site meets those standards. Heck, if a site is so botched up in the validation process, it’s even possible that Google won’t even be able to index it. The Elephant In The Room We Can’t Ignore Any discussion about validation and SEO must, by nature of this arena, include addressing the primary causality of 100% validation not being a “have to”.  One that Validation evangelists refuse to acknowledge as being a serious consideration. There are many millions of sites that already exist,  and millions more being deployed all the time, that are NOT 100% compliant. I’m not here to debate the cause of that or rail against anyone who might have caused it.  Heck.  My own sites fail to meet complete validation.  Because, as stated earlier, I am NOT a developer.  I use OFF THE SHELF solutions.  Programmed by other people.  Because that is what I felt was justifiable in costs to create my own sites. And that’s just reality. If any of the top search engines were to put more emphasis on w3C compliance than on those aspects that help the engine learn the purpose of a site or indicate importance of specific content, or help indicate 3rd party verification of a specific site’s authority, then the SERPs would be spitting out even more garbage than they do now.  Honestly. At The End Of The Day That’s what it really comes down to at the end of the day.  Because even if they DID say compliance is a factor, they could NEVER say it’s more important than those factors that are currently most important.  Because at the end of the day, if two sites are both fully compliant, that’s a one-time thing.  Either they are compliant, or they’re not.  But if two sites have different depth of content, the amount on one site or the other can change at any time.  And the relationships between pages can continually change. And the number of other sites that mention or link to either can change.  Frequently. And even if I tell my clients they have to get their sites to validate, in cases other than ones similar to those I describe here that are clearly specific to SEO, that validation is NOT going to move my client’s site up in the SERPs.  Because while they were busy revamping their P tags, sixty of their competitors were adding new content.  Or building quality inbound links. Yeah, But … Okay so I just said that ensuring a site validates for things that are not specific to current SEO isn’t necessary. Well, if that’s the case, then why is half the SEO industry freaking out over page speed? Clearly, on the surface, page speed has nothing to do with SEO. Except Google has given enough indication now that we are recommending page speed issues be addressed. Because Google has changed their tune. They say that a faster page load is providing a better user experience. Well surely then, if that’s the case, what’s to stop them from saying that 100% validation is also providing a better user experience? Simple. It’s that pesky P tag. Let me know when that changes. Alan Bleiweiss has been an Internet professional since 1995, managing client projects valued at upwards of $2,000,000.00.  Just a few of his most notable clients through the years have included PCH.com, WeightWatchers.com, and Starkist.com.  Follow him on Twitter @AlanBleiweiss , read his blog at Search Marketing Wisdom , and be sure to read his column here at SearchEngineJournal.com the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . W3C Validation for SEO – Myth and