Posted by maynem on Feb 4, 2010 in
SEO by Mark Maynem
Optimizing the images on your site can help your SEO efforts.
Google image search was labeled as Google’s fourth hottest property by Hitwise. The report went on to show that
Google image search attributed 5.79% to the company’s monthly market share of visits. With this type of data and developments in universal search the smart search marketer will leverage this area to his or her advantage.
Before undertaking image search optimization many search marketers will evaluate its value in relation to its clients. Will the value of this activity be higher than another SEO activity? This is important, as image optimization can be time consuming and lends itself to being more beneficial to some sites than others.
Image Optimization Tips
Filenames – Include the keyword you are targeting within the file name. Remember to use hyphens for spaces between the keywords.
Image Formatting – Make sure you use the correct image formats. For example save photos as JPG files etc.
Image Quality – Use good quality images, which will read well when shown in a thumbnail format. Poor quality images are unlikely to get click throughs.
Strings – Avoid using strings in image urls. Make your image urls as a readable as possible to human beings. Read more…
Tags: image, images, optimization, optimize, search, search engine optimization, SEO
Posted by Web Optimist on Jan 15, 2010 in
SEO By Richard V. Burckhardt
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| Got something to say? Guest blog at The Web Optimist. |
Just so you know, The Web Optimist blog is open to guest blogger articles related to SEO, VOIP and search marketing. These guest posts are free, of course (take that, Google!) and posts must be a minimum of 200 words in length.
Guest blog post in the following categories for free – SEO, News, Reviews. All are moderated and edited. Inappropriate posts will be deleted. Be civil, folks! A total of three links are allowed within the body text. Obvious spam, inappropriate or off-topic content will not be considered. In other words, if I do not like it, I will not publish it! 
Simply go to the Contact page to submit your article idea. I’ll set up frequent contributors with an author’s account.
Tags: article, blog, blogger, blogging, guest, optimization, post, search engine, SEO, write
Posted by Web Optimist on Jun 11, 2009 in
SEO By Richard V. Burckhardt
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| Social news sites are about content for the reader, not self promotion. |
This is part two of my series on Optimization for Social Media Integration, this time covering social media news.
The top two social media news sites today are Digg and StumbleUpon, so I’ll concentrate on these. However, Propeller.com, Reddit.com, Mixx.com (do-follow links) and Buzz.Yahoo.com are all worth a look.
The main thing to remember about social media sites is that the news on these sites is chosen by the users, making popular items even more so because bloggers look at this content for cool, link-worthy stuff and then re-post or write about them. The stories get great visibility and natural editorial links. In addition, the content is targeted, making it great for boosting your ranking and authority.
In brief: Digg utilizes outside voting, requires LOTS of votes for an item to go popular, generating less illegitimate content. StumbleUpon features toolbar voting, send page to a friend ability (which pretty much forces a view) and even includes the option to buy more views at a whopping 5 cents each.
Here are some general guidelines to make your social news more popular and to provide those nice surges of traffic to your blog or site. These spikes can be fantastic! Read more…
Tags: digg, media, News, optimization, SEO, social, stumbleupon
Posted by Web Optimist on Apr 8, 2009 in
SEO By Richard V. Burckhardt
Take a look at the following and see what you think:
- Create great content, including articles
- On page optimization
- Links from authority sites
- Get content on industry sites, providing contextual links
- Get noticed in Social Media
- Get noticed in search
- Get into niche sites
Sounds like the basics of SEO, right? Well, these apply to Social Media, too. Any SEOs out there who are still avoiding the Social Media bandwagon are, well, stuck at the bus stop without a token.
Social Media and search engine optimization have become so integrated that you can’t really separate them anymore. Social sites like Twitter, which many of us laughed at when it first came out, are pushing a revolutionary shift in how information is found on the Internet because they add interaction and community to the equation. In addition to the basics above, they throw in features like:
- Participation
- Voting
- Comments
- Friends
- Trust
That last one, Trust, is a BIG one. Social sites are working more like search engines these days and there’s a huge difference between they way they dish out results and the way the search engines do. The social sites look at what your friends think about a subject and their results are based on that. You trust your friends, right? A perfect example is Twitter search. It’s based on tweets from folks you can check out and follow or who can follow you. And, look out Google, it’s really fast! And, it’s immediate. You can catch what is happening right now. Wanna see what the fans of Battlestar Galactica are tweeting? Check it out in real time (Or, if you’re a real Twit, check out by the hash tag #bsg).
The search engines dish out results based on the trust of folks you don’t know (PageRank, back links etc.).
Which begs the question, will trust kill the algorithm?
So, think of Social Media sites more like search engines that can help your visibility in, well, search engines.
Confused?
Don’t be. It’s simple. The more social links you have, the more you’ll be noticed and linked to and crawled. It works pretty much the same way as SEO.
Next, Optimization for Social Media Integration. Look for this post soon!
Tags: optimization, search engine, SEO, social media, trust, twitter
Posted by Web Optimist on Dec 10, 2008 in
SEO 
For those of you who have read my blog in the past, you know I love to give quick tips on search engine optimization and web marketing. So as not to disappoint anyone, here’s a quick list of Dos & Don’ts for your social media campaigns (you ARE including social media in your online marketing, right? If not, find out how to get started in social media.)
1. Don’t go into it just for the links. You’ll get shot down by the community instantly. Social media is all about conversation and creating advocates for your brand, so share and engage in the conversation. Active conversations about specific topics attract passionate audiences.
2. Give your visitors a voice. Social media gives consumers some control and a voice. If your site doesn’t include a way for visitors to comment on or rate your content, you’ve got some work to do. A static web site that’s one-way (the visitor can only read it) won’t cut it anymore. Interactive sites are the norm these days, so you need to join the 21st century.
3. Join in on the top social activities. These are currently watching videos and sharing photos. In addition to posting and sharing on YouTube and Flickr, consider adding video and photo sharing to your own site, if appropriate, and create videos that can be shared (see Video Optimization). Just be careful with Flickr. They are cracking down on accounts set up by companies and deleting them. They only want personal use of their service.
4. Social media is NOT a substitute for SEO or PPC. Social media optimization must be integrated into your complete marketing plan.
5. Great customer service. This is a natural outlet to social media. Visitors can leave comments or questions on your site or on other sites like Facebook and you can respond. It is essential to monitor the various social outlets, not only to provide service, but to head off any problems or complaints before they build into something difficult to manage. Among the many tools that I use are Google Alerts and Tweetscan to send me alerts for Google and Twitter mentions.
6. Lock down branding. Combining SEO, PPC and social media can be great for this. Great rankings in the organics, advertising and social presence are a dynamite combination.
7. Grab your Twitter name. Twitter is incredibly powerful for weighting in the serps so use it! Just be sure to grab your name before someone else does!
8. Link to your profile pages. Make sure visitors can find your social site pages. Make your first weighted link to your profile pages a link from your company site.
9. Treat your YouTube videos just like HTML pages. In other words, give them a title, description, tags and make sure the very first thing in the description is the URL you want folks to land on.
10. Last but not least. If you don’t know where to start, go for videos and move on from there. In addition to YouTube, videos can be distributed and shared through Metacafe.com, Yahoo Videos and scores of others. Heck, even Flickr has video now.
Keep in mind that many of the top traffic sites these days are social media sites and that Web 2.0 is really about empowering users, not promoting you. And, take note that social search is different than web search because in social search, it’s about sourcing information from trusted people as opposed to general information that is dished out by a search engine.
Once further tip – using cloud tags can give you an idea of what is generating conversations as well as alert you to trends. I use one on my own blog, but there are a ton of other WordPress tag cloud plugins available.
Until my next list of inspirations, good Internet marketing!
Tags: facebook, flickr, optimization, social media, twitter, videos, youtube
Posted by Web Optimist on Nov 5, 2008 in
SEO I recently was contacted by a graphics house about some SEO suggestions for their web site. I took a look and found a gorgeous site with lots of great images and graphics, which is to be expected. After all, that’s what they do.
Problem is, there was basically no text. I asked about that and was told “We used ALT attributes on all of the images. Shouldn’t that work?”
I tried to explain that there is only so much that the ALT attribute can do for optimizing a web site. A combination of good ALT descriptions and keyword rich image names might make for good results in Google image search, but probably won’t help as far as general search rankings.
Spiders still need text, so get content! The more relevant text, the happier they will be and the more opportunities a site has to rank for general and longtail searches.
So, in addition to the other obvious basic S E O suggestions (like NOT using the exact same TITLE on every page), I suggested they add some descriptive text and dropped them these content development tips.
1. Fill in the gaps - Look for keywords in tools like Adwords Keyword Tool or the S E O Book Keyword Suggestion Tool for keyphrases and gaps you need to fill. These tools will help you find keywords and phrases relevant to consumer research cycles.
2. Blog about it - Got great images or graphics content to promote? Blog about them. Blogging is a great way to create descriptive text that can help build up rankings for sites that are restricted to a template or, like this example, wants to keep their main site all graphics or Flash. A blog adds great flexibility for adding text and links.
3. Pay for quality - If you are outsourcing your writing, make sure you get good content, not just keyword rich spam. SEO copywriting is for persuasion, not just filling a page with keywords. It’s more than writing, so expect quality to cost some money.
4. Convince the boss - Let’s say your boss just doesn’t understand why content is important. He/she thinks the site is beautiful, so who needs it? Take baby steps. Try tweaking the TITLE on each of the pages to reflect the targeted keywords. Show progress and explain why it worked. Win the war with small battles.
5. Explain - Give a good, clear explanation about what can be done to increase rankings through content development, but don’t lecture. Sure, you might be the resident expert, but NO ONE likes a lecture.
6. Forget magic keyword density – There is no magic keyword density for a page. That’s so 1998! Make your text natural language with your primary keyword phrase included two or three times on a page, ideally above the fold. That’s it.
7. Keep an editorial calendar - As you are creating your content, keep track of what has been done and what is planned. This is a mainstay for print publications and works quite well for bloggers, too.
8. Use keywords - Some folks have dropped the keywords meta tag. Yahoo and MSN still look at that tag, though, so go ahead and use it for best practices. You’ve got to start out with keyword research anyway, so pop them into the keyword meta tag. It’s easy and can’t hurt.
9. Get help – Got writer’s block? Check out SEOCopywriting.com or Robin Nobles’ Idea Motivator for tips, hints and suggestions online.
10. Help the user - Keep in mind that above all, it’s about helping the user to find content. It’s the user, not you or Google, the user!
For related articles, see the entire S E O 101 series.
Tags: content, development, google, keywords, optimization, research, SEO
