SEO Tip of the Day #5

Yerfdog recently put me on to a hot search engine optimization (SEO) tip. Google Image Search is an invaluable yet underutilized tool for web developers interested in increasing their Google PageRank.

An "img" tag contains a few different sections:

• src - the address of the image file
• height; width - the image dimensions
• alt - alternate text for the image in text-only browsers or browsers with images turned off
• title - the markup title of the image

The "src" portion must be filled in for the image to function, the height and width portions are optional, but help in making the page display properly.

The "alt" and "title" text are completely underused by most developers though. Very few people take the time to label their pictures, yet this is one the main ways GIS indexes pictures (along with the picture filename).

If you view the HTML of this page, you'll see the picture of the SEO girl at right is using these functions to the fullest. Let's hope GIS crawls and indexes it soon!

SEO Tip of the Day #4

Do you sell products on your website? If e-commerce is your thing, make sure you don't use a manufacturer's generic description when listing your products. Google will still index your pages, but you will get penalized for having duplicate content, since every other retailer will be using that same description.

A better option would be to write your own product copy (starting with the most popular products first), and writing a very descriptive, original outline of the product containing keywords people will be likely to search, especially if the product has a somewhat ambiguous name.

For instance, a USB key can call be a flash key, flash drive, thumb drive, pen drive, or portable hard drive. Including these synonyms in a relevant way to the reader will boost your Google rating and subsequently, sales.

SEO Tip of the Day #3

Trading links is a great way to increase your Google PageRank. The more incoming links you have to your site featuring favorable keywords, the higher up your page will be when someone uses those keywords as a Google search.

Don't have anyone to trade links with? Drop me a comment!

SEO Tip of the Day #2

META tags used to be the standard for tricking search engines into thinking your website had relevant content. These days the stakes are higher, and many search engines are smart enough to not only figure out what's displayed on your page, but whether it's white-on-white or a similar trick to try and fool it. The old trick of having a large block of invisible text at the bottom of your page won't work these days, Google is too smart to index that stuff.

Try placing important key words at the top of your pages, the larger the font the better. Heading tags () fell out of popularity in web design in the late '90's, but with CSS they are important tools for letting a search engine or RSS feed reader know what's important and big on a page. A short description of your page with keywords relating to your content will help with the relevancy and frequency of indexing by search engines!

SEO Tip of the Day #1

Wonder why you haven't seen frames on a serious website since 1998? They are TERRIBLE for search engines! Search engine spiders like to crawl HTML pages, and frames-based sites just don't offer much real content. Each "frame" is its own destination page, and they won't necessarily be crawled because of the algorithms Google uses to index websites (namely, keywords).

If you do insist on using frames on your website, use some type of CGI content delivery system to offer both a frames and no-frames version of the site, updated simultaneously.

Here's some additional reading on the subject:

• Weballey - frames - bad things
• Exactly WHY are frames bad?