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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 12 – Where to add keywords

ashish — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:39:11 +0000

In the previous post (Learn about keyword density), I explained what keyword density is, what should be the amount of keyword density (including the main keywords and secondary keywords), and tools that help you measure your keyword density. In addition, there is an emphasis on making sure that you do not stuff your keywords too much into the site, since that leads to readers getting turned off and search engines putting possible penalties on the site.
In this post, I will talk about moving ahead with keywords, and defining areas of the post where you can add these keywords, as well as some rules for the same. I had talked about this in an earlier post as well (Part 5 of the series), but will provide some more details in this post about how to do more detailed optimization for ensuring a higher search engine ranking. These tips consist of where to place the keywords in terms of the structure of the post and the site. Some of these are more speculative in nature (since there is no confirmation or different search engines treat such behavior differently) and some of these are sure fire tips that work to improve your search engine ranking.
(Warning: None of these will do magic! Search engine ranking improvements through such optimization can take weeks or months to achieve, and you need to be patient)
- Try to ensure that the keywords are not too tightly bunched in one section of the page, although there are conflicting views on whether it makes some benefit to slightly increase the keyword density in the top section of the post content
- Keywords in anchor text. This may not be clear to some people, so consider this. You have got an option to get a link to your page from some other site, and if it is a well regarded site, then your site can benefit. However, if you do get an option, make sure that the link is something like (camera phone reviews) rather than (click here). Getting keywords in an anchor text can do a lot of good to search engines belief in you as a credible source
- Page Title. Put keywords in your page title, with the keyword appearing earlier in the title
- Images. If there are images / video on the page, then add the keywords as part of the alt/title tags of the image, and also as part of the text that forms the description of the image / video
- In the URL. Most blogging platforms give you a way to modify the URL that will be formed, and you should ensure that you have keywords as part of the URL. Typically, the title of the post is used as the URL, but consider having one set of keywords in the title, and another set of keywords in the URL
- Domain name. It is difficult to get domain names that have sought after keywords, since they are all gone. Try different variations of the keyword as part of the domain name until you get it right. You may have to make some compromises in this process.
- Title of the blog. In the head section of the blog code, you can modify the title of the blog. Be sure to include keywords as part of the blog title.
- Headings. Headings are a good way to segregate your blog into sections, and search engines also like it if you add keywords in your headings.

And of course, if you know more such tips or believe that some of them need to be modified, please leave a comment.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 7

ashish — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 10:07:39 +0000

The previous post (optimizing sections inside your post structure) talked about some assorted steps you can to optimize your post (such as permalinks, bread crumbs (example, the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin), speeding up your site, and so on).
This post looks at optimizing the images on your site for better SEO. I can just hear some of you saying, Huh ! Why do we need to do something for images. Well, consider that Google Image Search drives a large number of people (on one of my blogs, it drives more than 70% of visitors, and this is not a photo blog), and Google, when displaying search results, many times shows images as a part of the search results, right near the top. If you were able to get your blog in there through some image optimization, would it not be worth it ? Well, if you are convinced, here goes:
- Number one item, you should ensure that all your images have an ‘Alt’ tag filled out properly. A search engine cannot read the image, and can only find out what the image is by the alt tag, and by the context in which the image appears. And of course, you earn credit from some visitors who are visually challenged and use these tags to figure out what the image wants.
- If you are not able to add ‘Alt’ tag properties / text to your images manually, make sure that they are not blank. Use a plugin such as the ‘SEO Friendly Images’ (link – automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes).
- This one is more speculative, but it is believed that if you host your image on a popular image sharing platform such as Picasa Web or Flickr, then you get a slight boost to your SEO rankings for the image.
- If possible, ensure that your images are in a separate folder that is accessible by search engines
- Don’t put too many images per page, so if you load 100 or so images, then it is taken negatively
- Make sure that you change the image file names that come from the camera and make it something distinctive. Don’t use something like P121765.jpg, instead make it something ‘Photo of Sydney Opera House from water level’. This helps in search engine ranking and gives a boost to the image ranking
- Now, something that is different. Look at the words surrounding a photo / picture, and make sure that the photo or picture sits in a section of text that describes it some degree and has some keywords in it. This also boost the ability of the Search engines image search crawler to rank the images higher.
- If somebody requests you for being able to use your photos or a thumbnail of your photos, then consider whether the photo is exclusive enough. If you feel that it is fine to do so, ensure that there is a link to your original blog post under the photo in the other site, since this helps in giving your link popularity a boost.
- When you are giving a link to your photos somewhere, don’t use the words ‘link’ or ‘click here’, instead use descriptive text as the anchor since doing this naming also helps in SEO
- Ensure that your photos have a standard aspect ratio, since search engines show thumbnails and these thumbnails are easier to show when they are of a standard size.

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Using Photos in your blog posts

ashish — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:49:06 +0000

I believe I have mentioned this in past blog posts, but more in the nature of a tip rather than an actual focused post. For some time now, I have been reviewing the sources of page visits on the Gadgets blog that I maintain, called Ultra Cool Gadgets (link). Sitemeter provides a simple set of statistics for how the users come to the blog, and if you look at the following Sitemeter site (link), you will get an idea of where a large section of users come to my site from.
Surprisingly, a number of users to my site come from URL’s starting with http://images.google.com …; these are people coming from Google’s Image search. How do I manage to get people to come to my site from searching for images ? This was not intentional when I started, but I had made it a point to ensure that with every gadget that I posted, I also posted an image. But it was not just an image, I also made sure that I did the following:
1. Made sure that the image contained an alt description. Most tools that allow you to upload an image to your Blogger blog do not provide a default to add the alt tag (although I believe posting the URL for an image in WordPress gives you an option for entering the description of the image). You need to modify the code for the image to ensure that the alt keyword has a description added to it.
2. This tip is slightly lower in importance from the previous tip, but try and make sure that the name of the image is also relevant. This is also starting to matter in terms of the discoverability of your images via Google Image search.
Once you follow these simple rules and ensure that images are posted along with the blog post, you increase the chances of making your images being found by more people, leading to a higher traffic for your blog. However, do not stuff images that are not relevant, and do not add description in the alt tag that is false, since that might lead to your images getting a penalty associated with them.
Over a period of time, Google automatically finds these images and adds them to its Images search database.

Optimization of Gallery2 – A photo album

ashish — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:05:51 +0000

Gallery2, located at this site, is a fairly useful and customizable photo album organizer. Gallery2 would be available at most hosting companies (for example, in my case, I host a Gallery2 installation, http://ashisha.com/gallery, which contains upwards of 4400 photos, and is hosted at HostMonster). The Gallery 2 provides a fairly customizable interface with many modules, the ability to link to some ecommerce transactions such as online printing solutions, multiple ways to upload photo to the site, and interface to CMS such as Joomla.
There are many users of Gallery2, given the advantages it offers. As with many other solutions, there are multiple ways to optimize the usage of Gallery2. Some of these methods and tools are:

FAQ for Gallery (how to reset your password, things not working, etc) – Link1, Link1

Moving Gallery2 installation from one server to another (link)

Performance Tips for Gallery2 (link)

Security Tips for Gallery2 (link)

ACL performance for Gallery2 (link)

Scalability of Gallery2 (link)

Using Gallery2 with Amazon’s S3 service (link)

Add Adsense to Gallery2 (link)

How To’s for Gallery2 (link)

Thirteen Ways To Add SEO To Gallery2 (link)

Gallery2 and SEO – Tips and suggestions (link)

Money making Gallery2 site (link)

Show your Gallery with Google AdSense (link)

Gallery 2 Optimization for Google Images search (link)

Promoting your Photo Blog (contd..)

ashish — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:18:25 +0000

An earlier post covered some tips for promoting a photo blog. This post covers some more tips that I learned while researching this topic of trying to promote a photo blog.
1. Ensure that your site does not have a robots.txt file that could prevent the search engine crawlers from indexing your site
2. Ensure that some keywords are there in the ‘alt’ description for the image file. At the same time, do not go overboard.
3. It has been found that if you change the filename of your file (from the filename generated by cameras) to something more descriptive, it has a beneficial effect on your images being indexed by Google Image search.
4. This tip is more about using Adsense to determine how Google is using your image. If you place an Adsense ad near your images (not to the right or left though), then the Ad gives you an idea of the keywords that are getting associated with your image. You may need to experiment with the text near the image as well as the text on the ‘alt’ tags so that you finally find the correct keyword association.
5. If you want to determine how Google Image search is indexing your site, there is an easy way. You should go to www.google.com/images, and then search for your site by typing ‘site:www.yoursitename.com. The results will tell you as to how Google Image is indexing your site.
6. If you need to determine whether the Google Image Bot is visiting your site, then check whether your site visitors contains this piece of text:
“Googlebot-Image/1.0″
This determines whether your site is visited by the Google Images search engine
7. The larger the image, the more time it takes for people to download your images, and makes it more difficult. Instead, keep your images of a regular size with the maximum dimension of either 1024 or 1200
8. If you place the image on a page that has a high PR rank, the image is likely to place higher in image search