Tag: seo

SEO for Google Images Search for Added Visibility

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With Google’s recent updates to Google Images, it just makes good sense to SEO your website’s images, particularly if they are an asset to your selling toolkit. Having indexed more than 10 billion images, Google’s densely populated tool attracts users who are “learning and even shopping.”

Searchers who have a very specific need may use Google Images to identify or learn more about what they want while at the same time consider possible solutions. For example, a home owner with a mold problem wants to identify the mold she has, learn more about it, and discover what can be done to get rid of it and keep it from coming back. Using Google Images, she would search ‘black mold on walls.’ Providing eighteen results per page, Google displays images related to the search. When the user clicks on an image, a new screen opens that displays the image and caption on top and the web page where the image resides below.

Ways in Which Google Identifies Images

The context in which the image resides on the web page carries the most amount of weight for image identification. Google’s indexing algorithm is predominantly concerned with the body copy or textual information on the page that surrounds the image or that the image supports. In other words, identification and relevance both play a factor in indexing and ranking. Think of Google’s overriding objective: to provide end-users with information relevant to their query. The assumption is that people search images as a stepping-stone to the more detailed information they are after. They don’t just wnt to see the picture. They want to learn something about it.

What You Can Do

Search engine optimization of your images ensures two very important things:

1) images are clearly identified and contextually placed on your web pages to offer you the greatest support for your sales and marketing or informational message; and

2) Google Search can easily identify them and their contextual relevance, making them easy to index and rank within the Google Image search results pages.

Strategically placing images on your web pages and ensuring they are surrounded by carefully crafted body copy offers you an additional opportunity to increase your visibility online and be discovered by potential buyers, members, or supporters who are actively looking for what it is you offer.

Search engine optimization of your images is another aspect of the optimization process that is designed to help you get discovered by your target audience groups and identify your highly focused content as relevant to their needs.

Why Search Engine Marketing is a Strategy

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If you consider that a strategy is a series of actions designed to obtain a specific goal or result then you can begin to appreciate why search engine optimization and paid search campaigns are part of a strategy and not a one-time initiative.

The process of developing an effective optimization strategy is equivalent to making a good business plan. You look to see where you are now, decide where you think you can realistically be in a year, 2 years and 5 years, and then develop the plan that is approached in phases according to the budgets you have set aside for its execution.

Starting with a comprehensive keyword research and analysis, you select the keywords and phrases believed to attract your targeted audience groups to become the focus of your campaign. A benchmark report serves to show you where you are ranking for those terms now and will be used again to measure your future success.

It is also important to understand the variables that may affect your current and future ranking results. These include items that have to do with your website, such as website architecture, the effectiveness of your web copy and images, design, title tags and meta data, calls-to-action and a number of other factors, as well as off-site factors such as other websites your web pages may be showing up on and what’s being said about your company over the internet on social networking, news, blogs, and review sites.

With website tracking and analysis software in place (generally Google Analytics is the best start), you have what you need to develop the phases of your strategy that will impact both short-term and long-term results. Google and the other leading search engines are looking for a steady, positive trend. Nothing gets accomplished overnight. Every positive step you take toward providing relevant, highly focused web content and establishing your online presence as an authority for the products and services you offer, as well as the areas you serve if you are a local provider, builds your “reputation” and solidifies your clout in the “eyes” of the search engines.

Before you engage in any search engine optimization or paid placement initiative, you will be best served by sitting down with an optimization professional who can clarify for you what needs to be done so you can achieve and maintain positive search engine results.  Select your SEO vendor wisely.  Learn about their process and capabilities, get references and request sample results of work that meet your expectations.

Keyword Stuffing Explained

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I recently received a request from a reader to clarify exactly what “keyword stuffing” is.

Basically, keyword stuffing is predominantly a black hat seo technique meant to trick (or “influence”) the search engines into indexing a web page for more terms then are relevant to the content found on the page.

‘Keyword stuffing’ is evident when a laundry list of terms appears in the title tag and meta tags.

Worst offenders may include terms that are often searched in the engines yet have nothing at all to do with the page or even site.

If your company sells several things, as most do, all of the terms related to them should not be mentioned in the title tag or stuffed into the meta tags on each page. They should not be stuffed into the web page copy either for that matter.

(For those of you who have no idea what a meta keywords tag is, it is an element of your web page that is used by the web developer to provide more information to the search engines about your web page. It looks like this:  <meta name = “keywords” content=“key word phrase” />)

Because of the abuse of this tag Google no longer even relies on the information placed here to determine relevance.

There are many variations on this kind of keyword deception. Invisible text is another black hat seo technique used to improve relevance by increasing keyword density or the number of keywords on the page in relation to all the text on the page. The keywords are placed on the web page using the same color as the page’s background so that they cannot be seen by people but they will be scanned by the search engine spiders.

Search Engines have matured enough to be wise to most black hat tactics and the penalties for engaging in illegitimate search engine optimization practices are pretty steep. They may include a total ban of the offender’s web pages from the engine.

The best practice is to play by the rules. Keep your web page content highly focused. If you sell many types of products create a product group landing page and then a separate landing page for each product type.

Help the search engines to index and retrieve your web pages by making their job easy.

To learn more about keywords and ranking see my blog post Effective SEO Tip When Looking to Rank for Additional Key Word Phrases.

Effective SEO Tip When Looking To Rank For Additional Key Word Phrases

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One of the biggest mistakes a site owner can make when trying to get certain web pages to rank well for additional terms is to dilute the effectiveness of an already high ranking page. It is a bad idea to add competing terms to a page that is already optimized and performing well. Additionally, it is a bad idea to attempt to optimize for similar but competing terms on a single page. The most effective approach is to create an entirely new web page that is highly focused on the particular keyword term or phrase for which you want to achieve higher ranking in Google.

Hopefully you have already done your comprehensive keyword research and have learned which of your target audience groups uses this particular term or phrase to search. It is important to identify the right target group first to ensure your newly created content is effective at both attracting and converting them. For example, if you market to both consumers and businesses, it is likely they refer to the same product using completely different language. Separate your lists and know which terms are used by consumers and which are used by businesses, or whatever your classification difference may be. Create compelling content that is highly focused on that particular term and that accurately addresses the type of customer group using the term to find you.

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