SEO has become the key of success of any website in today’s world, but still there are people who ignore the SEO part of their website and try to either find some cheaper ways to optimize their website or self optimize their website without having knowledge of SEO. At Himshilp we do a thorough study of our client’s website and its competitor’s website and then perform research to find the title, description, keywords, H1 tags and content in the respective client’s site.
I want to list 10 golden rules which could be followed, in order to avoid common SEO mistakes to optimize the websites:
Avoid badly framed website title:
Website title plays an important role in determining the rank of a page by search engines. If your website has irrelevant title, then your webpage will be given less relevance by search engine. After scanning your page the search engine matches your content with the title and keywords of your page, so it is very important to take care of few things while designing the title.
1. One should never use a keyword more than once in the title.
2. Title tag should be framed with 10 - 60 characters, without any special characters.
3. Always place the important keywords in the title obeying the rule of leftward i.e. the
First word is best, second is second best, etc.
4. The title should always relate to the content of the webpage, its meta description and
meta keywords and should be legible by the user.
5. There should be distinct title and description of each page.
Don’t use duplicate/ insufficient content of the page:
Never design duplicate or bad content for your webpage. Insufficient or Duplicate content will not be tolerated by search engines, even your websites can be banned. Content is known as the king of the web. So always write a content which is unique, friendly. Then people would like to link to you. You can even hire people who write decent unique content by paying them some amount.
Check all your backlinks (Poor backlinks/ less backlinks are harmful):
The quantity of backlinks/ incoming links of a website represent its popularity. The number of backlinks replicates the number of votes caste for a particular website or a web page. Google consider backlinks as a very important factor to determine page rank. Don’t link to the websites which are not relevant to your website as it will not benefit you. Always link to a high page-rank website. Google doesn’t support link-exchange, so better not adopt it. One way quality backlinks are always better for SEO. There are various ways to increase the backlinks. The submission to Directories & Search Engine Submission is the easiest yet powerful and result oriented activity. Creating interesting blogs and articles are also very helpful to get quality backlinks to your website. The social networking profiles can also be used to bring backlinks to your website.
Check all your internal links:
Broken internal links create negative impact on SEO. Always validate all your internal links so that there are no broken links in your website. Using similar anchor text in all the links is also not advised. Anchor text is the text which is the visible part of a hyperlink, never use the same anchor text in all your links like click here or some thing which is irrelevant to that link. Anchor text link should contain keywords. Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only. And try to use keywords in the urls also.
Use header tags in the content appropriately:
One of the POSITIVE ON-Page SEO Factors is the usage of keyword in H1, H2 and H3 tags. We should use these tags in order to get the page optimized. But the problem with these tags is that they don’t look nice as such in the web browsers for h1, h2 tags are too large and h5, h6 are too small. So overall appearance of the webpage gets distorted. That’s why generally people ignore them. But with the advent of style sheets it has become very easy for the programmers to change the hierarchy of the tags, so that one can view them in the browser with the appropriate size. Also one should never use H1 tag more than once in a page.
Use keywords properly:
Keywords are wonderful weapon of your websites so never ignore them whether it is keywords in meta tag, url, meta description.
meta keywords: Never use common meta keywords in all the webpages of your website. It will be screened as duplicate content filter checks by the SE. The common rule for Keyword in keyword meta tag is to use less than 10 words. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be punished for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice. If not, it may be considered as spamming.
Keyword in URL: Often people ignore the proper usage keywords in url, and it is stuffed with irrelevant words. Always use appropriate description of the page content in the url assuming this hierarchy First word is the best, second is the second best, etc.
Keyword in description meta tag: Do not put similar descriptions for all the pages. It should be unique for all the pages and relevant to the page content. Ideally it should contain less than 200 chars.
High Keyword density in body text: Ideally keyword density should be 5- 20% - (all keywords/ total words). Individual keyword density should be 1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words). But if you are thinking that using keyword everywhere will make the page more relevant then its wrong assumption. Do not stuff keywords unreasonably everywhere.
Make proper XML sitemap of the website:
Sitemaps helps you communicate with the SE. Website gets indexed in various search engines by XML sitemap. So always update your sitemap so that your webpages get indexed easily in the search engines.
Use < img> tag properly:
Most of the times the images are overlooked in SEO. Long and meaningless names of the images convey nothing to the search engine, try to incorporate some keywords in the image name so that the search engine will list them. Use alt tag to describe the images. ALT tags should contain a description of what the image is. It is a labeling device to translate your image into text for search engines. It also translates your image into a textual reference for users with visual handicaps. So use < img> tag carefully.
Don’t use too much of javascript where it is not required:
Use as much as clean HTML code instead of javascript code as the search engine could not translate java script.
Have patience:
There is no shortcut to get listed in top 10 for the selected keywords. It takes time for a page to get indexed in Google. So have patience and be vigilant. Publish unique quality content, by validating it and reinsure that it gets indexed properly in the search engine, this is an ongoing process, so keep changing the content of the website since if you will optimize your website for once and take a backseat then you can be out of index.
Finally be cautious of those internet marketing firms who give you 100% assurance in getting the pages indexed. Even Google says that there is no rule to get the 100% optimization and the rules to optimize the webpage are keeps on changing so be vigilant and take the appropriate step.
Showing posts with label alt tag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alt tag. Show all posts
Monday, October 12, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Boost traffic to your website by optimizing images
In terms of esthetics, images are an integral part of website design. They provide site visitors instant visual stimulation. In terms of SEO, images can be optimized and bring additional visitors to a website.
But images are often overlooked in SEO. But if we see next to regular search on a search engine Image Search is the fastest growing vertical search in the space. Compared to shopping, news, blogging, etc., image search has them beat by a mile. However, what's even more important about image search, is how the search engines are utilizing and incorporating them into their regular search results.
Nowadays images are incorporated in a lot of different ways. You'll see images coming up with the news one boxes, with descriptions of videos, a group of images could appear at the bottom of a page, as opposed to the top of the page. All of the search engines are striving to make the results more relevant and incorporating images into the results is definitely part of that strategy.
Here are few tips to optimize your site’s images for the search engines.
• Names of the images:
Avoid using any needless, uninformative words such as 'and', 'thus', 'or' and so on because they makes your content longer and complicated and make the reader lose interest. Make file names as clear and short as possible. The image name will appear beneath the graphic image in search results. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file Do NOT expect your photo editing program's default settings to give you optimized file names Default names communicate nothing to the search engines on their own. Make sure to set up your own file naming structure in advance. Use dashes between the words of images, rather than underscores. Nobody likes detailed data. Try to think of keywords that usually grab your attention and frame the filenames.
• Use Alt attribute of the img tag:
Search Engines only know what you tell them. Therefore, if we want a search engine to understand that a graphic is an ad, decorated text or coupon for your services you have to tell it. We do this via ALT (alternative) tags. ALT tags should contain a description of what the image is. It is a labeling device to translate your image into text for search engines. It also translates your image into a textual reference for users with visual handicaps. Finally, if a user has images turned off or a slow connection, they are presented with your textual alternative so your page remains relevantly contextual.
Search engine also gives importance to alt tag to determine the page rank of the website. Google indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images. The ALT attribute is also shown when the user pass over the image with his mouse.
Things to keep in mind while preparing alt tags for images:
1. Alt text is the best description of the image.
2. It should be short and simple. Avoid giving unnecessary details using alt tag.
3. If your image is decorative text then just use the same text in alt text.
4. If the image is the bullets we can leave the alt text blank.
5. Use two or three keywords at the most while optimizing images with alt text. Don’t use so many keywords.
Alt tag is a useful source to serve the problem of many web browsers displaying the image differently, and some browsers even don’t support some types of images in such cases alt tag is very useful.
• Robots.txt file:
Ensure that the folder you are storing your images in is not blocked by your robots.txt file. Store your navigational and "structural" type graphics in one folder, and block that from the spiders, store the pictures of products, events, or news related images in another folder and open that one to the spiders.
• Image freshness
Keep images fresh. If you're targeting high popularity keywords it's worth experimenting with re-uploading images. Image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and could affect relevancy. Re-uploading your images to keep them fresh.
• Reasonable image file size
The image size also plays an important role while loading the page. If the image is too big the page will take too long to get displayed, always specify height and width of the image so that the image will be loaded easily.
• Limited number of images per page
Don’t use too many images in a webpage it makes your webpage slow.
• Check images aren't being filtered out in Google Safe Search Filter
• Use a Caption for Your Image:
Placing a small caption directly under, on top or on the side of your image will help queue the search engines what the image is about. With a caption, you can be a little more descriptive about the picture than with the alt attribute, but again, make it flow natural.
• Design unique images to differentiate yourself
• Include Images With Articles, & Press Releases:
If you are sending out an article or a press release, don't forget to include an image, or a url to an image that the news outlets can utilized for their version of your news. By supplying the link to the image, it can encourage them to link to the image itself straight from your own website. Adding images to articles and press releases makes them more appealing to the reader.Boost internal linking and traffic by linking images to the relevant articles.
But images are often overlooked in SEO. But if we see next to regular search on a search engine Image Search is the fastest growing vertical search in the space. Compared to shopping, news, blogging, etc., image search has them beat by a mile. However, what's even more important about image search, is how the search engines are utilizing and incorporating them into their regular search results.
Nowadays images are incorporated in a lot of different ways. You'll see images coming up with the news one boxes, with descriptions of videos, a group of images could appear at the bottom of a page, as opposed to the top of the page. All of the search engines are striving to make the results more relevant and incorporating images into the results is definitely part of that strategy.
Here are few tips to optimize your site’s images for the search engines.
• Names of the images:
Avoid using any needless, uninformative words such as 'and', 'thus', 'or' and so on because they makes your content longer and complicated and make the reader lose interest. Make file names as clear and short as possible. The image name will appear beneath the graphic image in search results. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file Do NOT expect your photo editing program's default settings to give you optimized file names Default names communicate nothing to the search engines on their own. Make sure to set up your own file naming structure in advance. Use dashes between the words of images, rather than underscores. Nobody likes detailed data. Try to think of keywords that usually grab your attention and frame the filenames.
• Use Alt attribute of the img tag:
Search Engines only know what you tell them. Therefore, if we want a search engine to understand that a graphic is an ad, decorated text or coupon for your services you have to tell it. We do this via ALT (alternative) tags. ALT tags should contain a description of what the image is. It is a labeling device to translate your image into text for search engines. It also translates your image into a textual reference for users with visual handicaps. Finally, if a user has images turned off or a slow connection, they are presented with your textual alternative so your page remains relevantly contextual.
Search engine also gives importance to alt tag to determine the page rank of the website. Google indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images. The ALT attribute is also shown when the user pass over the image with his mouse.
Things to keep in mind while preparing alt tags for images:
1. Alt text is the best description of the image.
2. It should be short and simple. Avoid giving unnecessary details using alt tag.
3. If your image is decorative text then just use the same text in alt text.
4. If the image is the bullets we can leave the alt text blank.
5. Use two or three keywords at the most while optimizing images with alt text. Don’t use so many keywords.
Alt tag is a useful source to serve the problem of many web browsers displaying the image differently, and some browsers even don’t support some types of images in such cases alt tag is very useful.
• Robots.txt file:
Ensure that the folder you are storing your images in is not blocked by your robots.txt file. Store your navigational and "structural" type graphics in one folder, and block that from the spiders, store the pictures of products, events, or news related images in another folder and open that one to the spiders.
• Image freshness
Keep images fresh. If you're targeting high popularity keywords it's worth experimenting with re-uploading images. Image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and could affect relevancy. Re-uploading your images to keep them fresh.
• Reasonable image file size
The image size also plays an important role while loading the page. If the image is too big the page will take too long to get displayed, always specify height and width of the image so that the image will be loaded easily.
• Limited number of images per page
Don’t use too many images in a webpage it makes your webpage slow.
• Check images aren't being filtered out in Google Safe Search Filter
• Use a Caption for Your Image:
Placing a small caption directly under, on top or on the side of your image will help queue the search engines what the image is about. With a caption, you can be a little more descriptive about the picture than with the alt attribute, but again, make it flow natural.
• Design unique images to differentiate yourself
• Include Images With Articles, & Press Releases:
If you are sending out an article or a press release, don't forget to include an image, or a url to an image that the news outlets can utilized for their version of your news. By supplying the link to the image, it can encourage them to link to the image itself straight from your own website. Adding images to articles and press releases makes them more appealing to the reader.Boost internal linking and traffic by linking images to the relevant articles.
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