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marți, 5 aprilie 2011
Two Important Reminders
Calculate Your Tax Cuts
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How to Optimize Your Images For Search Engine Traffic Graywolf's SEO Blog
How to Optimize Your Images For Search Engine Traffic Graywolf's SEO Blog |
| How to Optimize Your Images For Search Engine Traffic Posted: 05 Apr 2011 07:54 AM PDT
The following is part of a multiple part series covering image optimization techniques. This article is intended for beginners through intermediate SEO’s; if this doesn’t pertain to you, you may want to skim as most of this will probably be review material for you. Some of the big questions many people ask are why would they even want to perform image optimization? Doesn’t it just help people who want to steal or hotlink images? And is there really any meaningful traffic or links that you can get from image optimization? IMHO the answer is yes. Let’s say someone is going on a trip to Italy. They might do image searches for things to do or see in Italy and for famous Italian landmarks like the Leaning Tower of Piza, the Trevi Fountain, or St. Peter’s Basilica. Thanks to Google’s universal search results, images provide a way to get onto the first page (or, in some cases, the top result) and get a click through, an ad view, or adsense impression. It might even get a lead generation completion. Maybe you run a fish store. If a university professor or government agency needs a picture of a fish and your image result appears, and you allow your images to be reused in exchange for a link, this can be huge way to passively build links slowly over time (true story! It happened for a client I used to have). Now that we’ve got the why out of the way, let’s talk about the “how” of image optimization. FilenamesThis is one of the most basic elements of image optimization. If you have an image of blue widgets, I would name your image “blue-widgets.jpg” or “blue-widgets.gif”. You can use other formats like PNG, but I have gotten better results with “jpg” and “gif” files. You can use other characters like underscore as word delimiters, but I get better results with hyphens. You can run the words together if they are separate in other factors. I have found stemming plays a role (ie widget vs widgets), but you can get around it using other factors. I haven’t seen capitalization play a role, but I prefer to use all lower case because I usually use Apache servers and case sensitivity matters. If you are going to have multiple images of the same object-type, I suggest adding a “-1″, “-2″ onto the end. Now, before the hate mail or hate tweets start, it is entirely possible to have an image rank without the keywords being in the file name–IF there are enough other factors in place. However, you should ask yourself why would you give up a chance to give a search engine a signal about what an image is about? If you work on a large ecommerce platform or other large database application, chances are good that your gold diamond earrings will have an image file name like “GDX347294.jpg” that corresponds to the item’s SKU or other internal classifier. So, yes, you will have to sacrifice the keyword for business reasons. ALT TextLet’s get the basic information out of the way: ALT text was designed for screen readers or visually-impaired people to know what they weren’t seeing. Your goal is to use it to satisfy the screen readers while being keyword focused enough for the search engines and without being a keyword stuffing spammer. Here’s an example of ALT text variations: Keyword stuffed: discount hotel room paris france Striving to find a balance between pleasing the search engines and text readers can be a juggling act. If you are risky with some of your other SEO techniques, I’d play this on the safe side. Headings and Bold TextIf image optimization for a particular image is important, I really like to optimize the image with bold or a heading tag of the term I’m chasing right above the image. I’ve found this really helps give a strong signal to the engines  Oceanus Statue from Trevi Fountain Image Captions Image captions like the one to the right are another way I really like to give the search engines a good nudge in the direction I want them to go. Try to place the search term you are trying to optimize for at the front of the caption. Image sizeI’ve found that if you keep your images a reasonable size you generally do better with image optimization. That’s not to say really big or really small images won’t rank, just that images that are larger than 100×100 and smaller than 1200×1200 work best. Using a thumbnail that links to a larger picture can be helpful. Image TrafficSo what can you expect from image traffic? Like all things, it depends on what you are chasing, but I have one image that ranks on the first page for a single word term that brings in hundreds of views for me every month. The page has adsense on it and, over a single year, it brings in several hundred dollars worth of revenue. It’s something to think about before you write off image optimization.  Images Traffic Data So what are the takeaways from this post:
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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review. |
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SEOptimise
SEOptimise |
| Is Your Content Great, Big or Just Long? Quality vs Size Posted: 04 Apr 2011 05:54 AM PDT
These days the “content is king” and “you need great content” mantras are everywhere. While some people in the SEO industry challenge it by stating that great content is not enough, you need to push, promote or market it as well. I rarely see an article that actually explains what great content is or actually could be. Also, many sites that allegedly offer great content provide mostly big or just long content.
With the latest Google update aimed at so-called content farms, we’ve seen a flurry of articles focused on content quality. This is a good start, as content farm articles are often just long without offering value. Long or even big shallow content is not enough these days. Great or quality content is the key. I’ve been guilty of producing big content instead of great content myself here on SEOptimise. Let me explain the differences between the three common types of content you encounter on the Web today: Great content Great content is content that, no matter what its size, offers some unique solutions or insights. Great content doesn’t have to be long or big. It has to be insightful, easily digestible and self-explanatory.
Big content Big lists that are big on social media and appeal to the crowds not the experts, specialists or early adopters. Over the years the Web has been flooded with big content. While those who popularised big content in the early days were also providing great content, just think Smashing Magazine or Mashable lists the copycats were just taking the form (of the list) and filling it with average ingredients. Lists of “creative images” or “nice art” still got quite big on the Web, but they wore out as time passed and people became wary even of the lists with great resources. I’ve been providing big content here on SEOptimise for years and while I strive to make it great as well, the perception by my industry peers was in more and more cases telling me otherwise: the posts were shared by outsiders, newbies or people from the main stream. So while big content often draws crowds it doesn’t often help to build a reputation of quality.
Long content Long content can be a very long article, a collection of numerous images, a video that takes 20 minutes or anything else that takes that long to view, read and digest. With short attention spans predominant on the Web today, it only gets skimmed rather than consumed in its entirety. In the best case it gets saved for later in the “to read” folder and it never actually gets read as a whole. It seems that long content has evolved for many reasons other than what readers on the Web really prefer. SEO practitioners aimed at providing more content for the Google bot, while writers who got paid for the number of words tried to earn a living by producing longer instead of better content. Mass media needed more page views for their ads, so they spread a series of loosely similar images over ten or more pages and forced visitors to click to see the next one. Videos have been hailed as the new must-have online medium as more and more people turn to YouTube instead of TV or text-based sites. So webmasters provided long monologues from their webcams just to show up in YouTube in Universal search results. All of these reasons to create long content were not based on actual demand by the consumers but by structural requirements of the production or dissemination process. Reading and viewing habits on the Web have been known for years. People want quick solutions for particular problems. They don’t want to read long copy. So providing long content is a user experience no no. When you take a look at content farms you will notice that their content is often long but shallow. The length does not provide actual depth; it only feeds Google with more words to index.
Quality content The old idiom “quality not quality” still rings true. Quality is not measured by the size of a list, length of a video or the number of words. Quality means an inherent value of its own.
Beyond content The concept of content is a very limited one. Ask a film-maker, poet or chef whether they provides content and they won’t often say yes. A film-maker creates movies, a poet poems and a chef recipes. It’s not just that these are more specific terms. They also imply quality, or rather another mindset.
Content means the stuff that gets published on a blog or site other than ads. So artists do not see themselves as content creators. Rather those who make money from their works, just as content thieves make content out of art by republishing it in a more readable way. So at the end of the day you should aim for writing powerful poetry not great content. The reason why Google always preaches great content:
Good SEO is not just providing Google with fodder; it’s giving the people what they want. It also does not mean attracting large crowds with mainstream content. Often the better business model is to go after a narrow niche and become a specialist or expert in it.
The content farms used Google Adsense to monetise their low quality content. As people often click Adsense ads when the content is not really what they’re looking for, it was big business for the content farmers and Google alike. Now that Blekko shows Google how you can provide clean search results without shallow Google-optimised content, they had to act. They lose money in the short run, but they hope to make more users stay with them instead of using Blekko and other social search engine contenders. One day quality will become the new king and then sheer content won’t rank anymore. A love poem of a few lines will then outrank a huge article of 6000 words about love. So content creation is not a long term strategy – it’s just good now, as long as Google depends on size and we depend on Google.
Cruel irony: I couldn’t make this article short and concise and still bring the point across.
* Image by danorbit. © SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Is Your Content Great, Big or Just Long? Quality vs Size Related posts:
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Seth's Blog : The difference between blueberries and apples
The difference between blueberries and apples
(one bad blueberry spoils the whole bunch)
If you serve yourself blueberries by the handful, you won't be able to inspect each one. And so just one rotten blueberry can ruin the entire bowl of cereal.
An apple is different. It's hand picked. Pick the wrong one and it's not such a big deal, you can just pick another.
If you sell apples, then, the goal is to make the great ones great, really great. If you're in the blueberry business, on the other hand, the goal is to eliminate defects.
An artist who works on matters of personal taste, then, can afford to go to the edges... in fact, she must. Let the buyer choose! Books and paintings and houses are apples.
The manufacturer of fungible items, on the other hand, embraces six sigma, because recovering from a failure is expensive (and it's your fault). Sutures are blueberries.
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