Posts Tagged ‘ALT attribute’

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Building Links

There are a lot of different approaches to building links. The different types of links discussed in the previous post in this series can gain you links in various degrees of goodness. But like most things, quick-fix solutions rarely ever provide excellent long-term value. That’s not to say quick fix solutions aren’t sometimes needed or warranted, but they rarely make a good long-term investment.

A link only has a certain amount of value, much like the value of a casual acquaintance. But like a true friendship, a link relationship goes much further and has a lot more potential.

The concept of building links is best when it’s focused on building relationships. You’ve heard it said, “give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.” In the same way, build a link and you get a link. Build a relationship and you get a lifetime of links.

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The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Link Analysis Progression

I said in my last post that each link is essentially a vote for the page that’s being linked to. That, essentially, was the original link analysis factors. Things have come a long way since then. Today’s link analysis factors are far more complex.

Over the years what gets analyzed as part of the link has changed in order to provide better search results to web users.

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Heading Tags

Heading tags are certainly no magic solution to building keyword relevance. They are merely one more baby step to creating a well-rounded optimization of a page. Adding heading tags using your keywords may or may not make a difference in your keyword rankings, but nonetheless, balanced against the rest of the page, using a heading tag properly, with keywords, is going to benefit your visitors, if not the search engines.

On the search engine front, at the very least, the Heading tags (H1, H2,… H6) can be used to tell the search engines the hierarchical structure of your page’s content.

When developing content, it’s pretty easy for visitors to see how the page breaks down, but search engines need a bit of help. The heading tags are that help.

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When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.

While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:

• Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
• Text immediately surrounding the image
• The overall content of the page the image is on
• Image ALT attribute in the image tag

When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.

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