Using Images for SEO: Leverage the Image URL

We recently covered SEO for Images so I figured I'd write a follow-up post about another tactic you can use to help search engines "understand" what particular images are of. The alt tag is still your most powerful ally in this battle, but don't forget the image URL. The search engines most certainly look at the name of the image file for additional clues as to what that image is of. For example, an image file called chocolate.jpg is much more descriptive than IMG003482.jpg.

So, when naming your image files, first make sure that you use names for the files that are descriptive, and second, ensure that those descriptions are mindful of the keywords you are targeting. Every bit counts when helping search engines properly interpret your pages, especially when it comes to images.

SEO for Images: The Alt Tag and Image Search

We've talked a good deal about how to ensure your content is properly indexed by search engines and ranks well for keywords that are important to you.

However, what about when your content is not "readable" as in an image on a page? How do you ensure that the search engine is able to understand what the contents of the image are and in turn drives relevant search traffic to that image and the page that contains it.

The answer to this question is fairly straightforward yet one that is often overlooked: Use the "alternative" or ALT tag to provide attributes to describe the image. Not only is this a good thing to do from an accessibility and usability standpoint but also for SEO.

The syntax is as follows: img src="image.jpg" alt="alternative description here"

As you decide what to include in the alt attribute, make sure that the attribute accurately describes the image and also that the way it is described is such that it optimizes for the keywords that are important to you.

Finally, search engines like Google have image-focused search options (e.g., Google Image Search) which can actually drive quite a good deal of traffic by itself. Make sure to keep that in mind as you create appropriate and relevant alt tags for your images.

Which URL Shortener to Use for SEO

The explosion of Twitter in 2009 has led to a surge in the use of URL shorteners as well as as a surge in the number of different URL shorteners out there.

There are a few things, from the SEO perspective, you need to know when selecting which URL shortener to use.

First, you want to pick a URL shortener that is going to exist into the future. If shortened links to your site are being posted throughout the web, those are all links that could be in jeopardy in the event that the URL shortener used to shorten them becomes defunct. This happened most recently with tr.im and a lot of controversy followed. Some efforts (most notably 301works) have arisen to remedy this risk, but regardless, I'd suggest picking the most robust URL shortener when shortening your own URLs (if others are shortening your URLs there's little you can do there).

The other thing you need to make sure you do is that you use a shortening service that uses a 301 redirect to your URL (we covered when to use a 301 redirect previously). Search Engine Land had a good post on this topic and a chart that goes over the main shorteners and which ones use proper redirects (as well as other factors you may want to consider).

In short, to make your decision easier, I'd say go with the biggest shortener. They're likely to be using the redirects correctly (or else not so many people would use them) and they're also likely to be a robust solution that will be around into the future.

Re-directs and SEO: When to Use 301 and 302 Redirects

URL redirection or URL forwarding is basically when a website tells a browser that a page has moved. For example, the page formerly hosted at http://OldURL.com may now be at http://NewURL.com. Thus, as the webmaster you'd want to tell anyone that goes to OldURL what the new address is - something you can do automatically via a browser redirect (http status code starting with a 3)

There are two most common types of redirects, a 301 redirect and a 302 redirect. A 301 redirect means that a page has been moved permanently while a 302 redirect means that a page has been moved temporarily (or for an unknown reason).

If your page is moving to a new URL for whatever reason, and you want to maintain the SEO authority that you've built up (e.g., from multiple inbound links pointing to the old URL), you'll want to use a 301 redirect. The 301 redirect tells search engines that whatever authority they were previously ascribing to the old URL should now be passed on to the new URL, and therefore you shouldn't lose any of your SEO authority.

That said, there have been occasions where people have attempted to use redirects to game search engines. For example, one could buy another site with a good deal of inbound links and then attempt to 301 redirect that site to your site and transfer its link credit. Search engines can often spot these maneuvers and will see through them, thus removing the inbound link credit. If you're going to purchase a site and want to maintain its credibility make sure to thread carefully and read up about best practices prior to doing it.

Number of Pages Indexed: How to Find out How Many Pages You Have Indexed

Ensuring the search engines are properly indexing pages from your website is critical for SEO - after all, if the search engines aren't indexing your pages, those pages will never come up for search results!

So, how do you find out how many pages from your site are getting indexed? The easiest way is to search for the following on Google:
"site:url.com" (no spaces)

SEO Book notes that searching for site:url.com and site:www.url.com can lead to slightly different results. Also, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to get some additional information on the pages Google is crawling on your site and how that changes over time. We'll go over Webmaster Tools in a future post.

Internal Cross-Linking of Keywords (a la Wikipedia) for SEO

Have you ever noticed how every article on Wikipedia is full of links to other wikipedia articles? For example, the first sentence of the article on SEO reads (including links):

"...is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via 'natural' or un-paid..."

Linking internally serves two main purposes -- First, it allows readers to easily access other reference information that is pertinent to the article they're reading rather than having to lookup that information themselves (and possibly leading to a loss of that reader to another site). Second, it helps a lot with SEO by providing the target articles (in this case the article on "web site" and the one on "search engines") with both relevance and authority.

Relevance is given by the association of that anchor text (the underlined and linked text, like "web site" above) to that page. It tells the search engine that the page that link is pointing to is about the keywords that are pointing to it. Authority is given by the link authority that is transferred from the current article to the linked to article. Of course all the articles are inter-linking throughout the site, so the authority is being spread throughout.

The example of Wikipedia is a powerful example of internal cross-linking in effect. Think about how you can do this on your web site in a programmatic fashion that both adds value to the user (allowing them to access related content quickly - thus keeping them around for more pageviews) as well as improves your own SEO.

Breadcrumbing for SEO - Getting your Pages Indexed Properly Via On-Page Links

Sitemaps are one way of getting search engines to understand your site and all the pages you have, but they're not always totally effective, especially as your site grows (in number of pages) and those sitemap files start getting larger, and large.

One way to "show" search engines all the pages on your site as well as to tell them what those pages are about (playing into their relevance for targeted keywords), is by using a practice commonly referred to as breadcrumbing.

Breadcrumbing refers to leading the search engine throughout your site by making it follow specific paths you set up through links between pages. Ensuring that every page on your site is linked to from somewhere is a key component to making sure search engines know that page exists and can index it properly. Not only that, but as you lay breadcrumbs for the search engine to follow, you can use the anchor text in the links (the text that is underlined and links to the other page) to tell the search engine what the destination page is about (giving it context/relevancy).

Breadcrumbing could be done fairly 'dumbly' by simply including a couple of links from every page to the next couple pieces of content in some sort of sequential order. Perhaps by showing a "Next Article" or "Next Products" link(s) at the bottom of the current page. You can also leverage breadcrumbing to improve user navigability of your site. If the links are done in a logical manner that helps the user discover related content, that helps both SEO and navigation. For example "Related Articles" or "Similar Products." To ensure you're linking to all the pages (rather than your algorithm inadvertently leaving out certain pages from the link structure), you may want to inter-mix some kind of relevant linking with some sequential linking. Perhaps a "Next Article" link coupled with a "Related Articles" link.

Content to Code Ratio (Code to Text) - Reduce Code Bloat on Your Page to Improve SEO

The content to code ratio (or code to text ratio, etc.) refers to how much code your page has relative to how much content (or text). An easy way to see this is by viewing the html source (e.g., View > Page Source in Firefox) and looking at how much code there is relative to how much readable text. Given that search engines look at the code for a given page, bloating that page with a lot of code (which is not contextual), simply dilutes the text that is there, thus lowering your page's relevancy to various keywords you may be targeting.

Why do you have a low content to code ratio? Three typical reasons and solutions include:

• You include Javascript code in the page - move your JS to another file, if you can't do that, move it to the bottom of the page (the lower something is in the page, the less weight it carries with the search engines)
  
• You use a lot of in-line styling - use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), located in an external file, to reduce code
• Formatting using tables - use CSS to create grid layouts instead as it requires less cod

Here's a good tool I found to test the content to code ratio.

Using Nofollows in SEO: Controlling Page Rank Passthrough and Avoiding Links to Spam and "Bad Neighborhoods"

Nofollows are a powerful and important tool when thinking about SEO. They are used by adding a rel="nofollow" to a link, for example (courtesy of Wikipedia):
a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow"

Nofollows should be used to indicate to the search engine that you do not want to pass any authority on to the page the link is pointing to. It either means that the page is one of little importance, or one who you're not necessarily sure you trust and therefore don't want to endorse with a link.

The first case is often done for footer links on your site, or to limit the number of followed links a page has. This is oftentimes mixed up with the practice of "PageRank sculpting" which is a practice that we'll talk about another time and that has unclear value.

The second case is great to employ if you have a site with user-generated content and user-generated links. By no-following things like comments and posts, it discourages spammers to post links from your site pointing to theirs in efforts to boost their own credibility with the search engines. Also, it prevents you from getting penalized by the search engines for (unknowingly) linking to "bad neighborhoods," or sites that are known to be malicious or spammy.

The bottom line? Use nofollows when you point to pages on your site you don't want to pass authority to as well as for most out-going user-generated links that you cannot reliably trust.

Advanced SEO Tips

Here are all the tips that fall under the Advanced category