Take the Trouble to Label Images

More on demonstrating expertise on other sites with care: after advising someone to offer text alternatives for images I jumped on a chance to comment on a related blog post in detail… Problem: the blog has moved — in haste I missed the date in my feed reader and on the page. And since the comment hasn’t been approved and may never be…

Labeling images and offering text alternatives is not only good for search traffic generation it’s also best practice for accessibility… It offers people using screen readers an insight into images on your pages because the reader can read the text.

Years ago when there was more weight attached to alt text (i.e. text to display when images are turned off coded as alt=”relevant keywords”) for images we used to suggest using image descriptions to improve keyword density without making your content read like keyword spam.

This technique was abused by people who loaded image alt text tags with unrelated keywords. And, as with meta descriptions and meta keywords content, search engines stopped attached any ranking weight to it.

But adding appropriately keyword-rich text/labels still has value in the image search context and also in context of universal or blended search (where search engines show web page, video and image search results together). As Deb says, making it easier for search engines to understand what your images represent will pay search visiblity dividends.

Best practice:

• do a quick check for popular keywords related to your image (Google Adwords free external keyword tool is perfect for this)
• name the image file using popular keywords separating individual word with a hyphen — popular-keywords.jpg or popular-keyword.gif. (Search engines will identify keywords in merged names and when you use underscores, which they don’t recognise as breaks, but creating a space between individual words with hyphens is worth the effort — as it is in URLs*.)
• give images alt text (alt=”popular keywords”)and title tag (title=”popular keywords”) that include — you guessed it — popular keywords.

Note: most content management systems and blogging platforms offer fields to enter this data as you upload an image file; use them.

Attention to this little detail — even if you skip the keyword research step when keyword choices are obvious — can amke quite a big difference to your blog/site’s chances of getting search traffic.

* There is continuing debate about the value of keywords in URLs but many CMSs now offer control of the URL so why not attend to this little detail too?

SEO Spam Primer Featuring Key Insights From Major Search Engines

Found this really great video of SMX East (US Search Engine Optimisation Conference) session on SEO Spam on Search Engine Land. Nothing really new from my point of view. But a succinct introduction to tactics that will get you in trouble with search engines… If your search engine optimisation company recommends the things discussed in this video, fire them.

This video is a useful primer on SEO spam for anyone who isn’t familiar with the issues. And it offers great information on finding out if you have been penalised by search engines and what to do about it. But it also has significant value as an insight into big search engines’ assessment of sites and attitude to links.

Talking About SEO Spam Means Talking About What Search Engines are Looking For

Random quotes/notes, many of which are music to my ears, as an exponent of an “offer content that is of value to your target audience and the search engines will value it too” approach to SEO:

• Don’t “lose track of the user perspective” in building links — for Yahoo it isn’t about whether a link is paid but whether it is a value link that makes sense with respect to the content of the source and destination of the link… good links point your users to content they will value.
• Nathan Buggia of Live Search reminds people of the all-important search engine perspective on assessing the Web. A perspective too often lost in the discussion around obtaining search engine visibility –
  

  “Goal of a search engine is trying to find really great content and connecting people that want that content”

• Nathan again: “stay focused on creating good content” … ahem… content is… um… king!
• For Aaron D’Souza of Google site owners should concentrate on, “building great content that users are going to create the links for you” — that is, offer content that people will want to link to rather than get involved in trading links, etc.
• Aaron also reassures people that the removal of the suggestion that people submit their sites to online directories from Google’s Webmaster guidelines didn’t mean those links had been devalued. Seems it is about discouraging the plethora of low value directories. Removing the suggestion makes it harder for these directories to convince nieve site owners that investment in listings on their sites was an essential part of obtaining search visibility.
• Sean Suchter of Yahoo! Search talks about an approach to web content I would heartily endorse, suggesting site owners create content that has “timeless user value”. He cautioned against adopting the latest techniques based on SEO’s interpretation of the latest algorithm changes. Future algorithm changes will inevitably discount that content’s value… “What might work this year or this quarter might stop working at some near future point if it isn’t necessarily user focused.”

So it might be a session about what you shouldn’t do to get search engine rankings but it ends up being a powerful insight in what you should do.

Search Engine Optimiser or SEO Buyer This is Stuff Worth Knowing… Worth Watching

Watch it for that and a really interesting discussion around the issue of paid links and PageRank (Google’s measure of link popularity/site authority, Link Flux” for Yahoo! and “Static Rank” for Live Search) and whether search engine rankings should take account of big brands’ profile…

All sound a little geeky? Some of it is. SEO spam involves some tricks that take you to the border of geek world. But if you are trying to get search visibility or employing search engine optimisers, you should take a look. You will learn something.


SMX East 2008: What Is Spam? from Search Marketing Expo on Vimeo.

Flash For Search Engines

It is one of the maxims of search engine optimisation: if you’ve put it in Flash it might look good but you’ve pretty much hidden it from search engines.

But maybe the maxim doesn’t apply any more.

Google, Yahoo! and Adobe have got together to figure out a way to offer the big name search engines access to content in Flash file formats (SWF). According to Ecommerce Times:

“The two search companies will use an optimized version of Adobe’s Flash Player technology to improve their engines’ abilities to index the Flash file format (SWF) and scan information contained within the files.

This, according to Adobe, will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content powered by Adobe Flash Player and which would otherwise remain outside the scope of traditional Web searches.”

There are already some things you can do to get content in Flash indexed. Things like, most basically, “noscript” content and ensuring that SWF file meta data is keyword rich. This, though, is an interesting development.

A kinda “duh” development, though. S’pose Adobe weren’t too concerned that Flash movies couldn’t be found via the way people find things online, search engines. That didn’t stop Flash being popular with advertising creatives, gamers, etc. or widely used. But taking 12 years to take some steps to cater to search engines…

Indeed, its not clear who approached who. Maybe the impetus came for the search engines’ endless quest to deliver good results. That definitely the feeling I’m getting from what Google has said on its Webmaster Central Blog and Googleblog:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

Bottomline: I wouldn’t be rushing to redo your navigation in your site in Flash. It will be a long time before “no flash please if you’re looking to get traffic via search engines” drops out of SEO-client conversation. Best bet is still href text links — modify it all you like via css but offer the simple links.

After thought: Will be interesting to see what impact this has. The heavily designed sort of sites that make use of flash aren’t generally put together in a keyword savvy way either. (Think of big brand sites put together by big ad agencies — Adidas isn’t to worried about using running shoes a lot in website content, for instance.)

The question is whether the text content in Flash files will actually help search engines understand what the content is about.