Using Images to Increase Your Search Engine Rankings

If you are an online business owner then you must read this article. You could be losing hundreds or thousands of visitors each and every day. Did you know that millions of people are using the web to find pictures of Old Faithful, a 69 Mustang or a cartoon drawing of Bill Clinton? There are potential customers searching for graphics of your products and services right now. Are you capturing their business?

The major search engines have been collecting images from websites and sorting them by topics, keywords and alt tags. Are you optimizing your images properly to take advantage of this free advertising?

Google's Image Search forms about 12% of its regular search queries. That's a lot of searching for graphics. To give you an example, Googles Image Search accounts for more queries than Ask.coms regular queries. If your online business lends itself to photos, that percentage could mean a jump to 25-40% of your traffic.

There are a few basic rules to optimizing your images. While optimization is optional, I highly recommend taking the additional 30 seconds to add alt and title tags and proper graphic names. The difference in traffic and income could be drastic.

Some folks shy away from alt tags these days. I still like them and use them to my advantage. The trick is to code the tag so that it provides a line of information to your website visitor.

For example, I have a fitness website that displays photographs of different exercises. The alt tag for a particular exercise would read: Crunch- Keep Belly Button Pulled Into Spine.

In other words, use the alt tag to sum up your main point of having the graphic in the first place. Be sure to include words in your alt tag that help define the picture as well. The alt tag will only display if the graphic does not load, or if your visitor is using a text based browser.

Use the title tag in your images as well. The title tag will display when you move your cursor over an image. The title tag is built into the coding of the image just as the alt tag is. You should also use words that describe the graphic and provide additional information.

Another way to optimize images is in their file names. All graphics have a file name when you save them. This is a simple way to earn points with the search engine! Instead of naming your ab crunch picture 1yhjdk65789.jpg, why not name it ab-crunch.jpg? Its all about using words to describe the image.

This may be reminding you of keywords. Images should be treated just as your online business content. Ill even go a step further and say that images should be an integral part of your website content. Use every advantage you have to rank well at the engines!

One caveat: do not spam your alt or title tags. Search engines are growing smarter every day. Build your web business with dignity and honesty. The throwback will be tenfold.

Your hosting company should provide image search traffic analysis of your website. If your hosting company does not provide this, strongly consider switching hosting companies. Graphic and image searches are going to increase in the coming months and years. You must know how it affects your traffic and your bottom line.

Copyright 2006 Lynn VanDyke

Lynn VanDyke's content website is in the top 1% of all websites worldwide according to Alexa. She recommends this hosting company for your online business: http://my.sitesell.com/buildit . For your free online business "How To" guide, please visit: http://my.sitesell.com/action-guideFigurines
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Designs That Make a Difference

It seems that I cant get through a day without having to spend a couple hours trying to talk a client out of doing something crazy.

Im only the designer and should give the client what he/she wants, but I have a hard time not adding in my two cents and sometimes even refusing to do a design because I disagree with the direction the site is taking.

For some reason people really have a hard time understanding that a visitor to their site could careless what the site looks like.

They have come to your website to find information, buy a product or be entertained not for a flash intro page, a cute little guy typing away at his computer or the little stat counter that shows how little visitors your site has really had.

They dont care about the colors of your site, the pictures in the header, your logo, colors, fonts or anything else you might think is important.

They are there for a purpose and have a goal in mind and could careless about all the other stuff.

So does the design even matter?

You can bet it does, but not in the way a lot of people seem to think.

While the visitor to your site could careless about the color of your site the colors do effect him/her. In most cases the site visitor is not even aware of the effect the colors have on them.

Some colors have more influence then others but all colors do influence our emotions.

For example blue is a calming, peaceful, and trusting color while red is anger, impulsive and an action color.

Im not going to write about all the effects each color has on a person but knowing what colors to add into a site can effect the response a person takes while on your site.

Another aspect of the design is in font and size of the font.

Large easy to read fonts are an important part of your site. The easer it is to read what you have to say the better the chances are that a visitor will take the time to read it.

Adding scrolling text and moving pictures will only distract the eye of the reader and make the text more difficult to read as will using crazy font colors or constantly changing the colors of the font.

Something else I see a lot of people wanting to do is add pictures into the header that has nothing to do with the site.

You have 3 seconds to let your visitor know what your site is about. If you add pictures of pretty flowing rivers while trying to sell pigs online this will only cause confusion and cause the visitor to leave in hopes of finding his/her perfect pig some where else.

So if your selling pigs, then put pictures of pigs in the header.

The header is the first thing people see when entering your site, by using appropriate pictures in the header it helps give an understanding of what your site is about.

Its also a good idea to put a nicely designed logo in your header that tells something about your business. I know most people could careless rather or not you have a logo but a logo does help to build trust and credibility.

Something else I find funny is the all about me text everyone wants to place on their home page.

No one cares about you or your business; they only want to know whats in it for them.

So the first line of text should tell the site visitor why they should even consider spending more then 3 seconds on your site.

What can you do for me?

I could go on with my rant all day but the more I type the better I feel.

But before I end my rant I would like to say one last thing.

The navigation on your site is an important part of your site, trying to come up with something original is just crazy. As a site visitor I dont want to spend an hour trying to figure out how to go to the next page on your site.

Just make the navigation the same as everyone elses and be happy your site visitor decided to stay long enough to look through your site.

Ok, Im through with my rant now and I can go back to work.

Janeth Duque is the owner of Geeks On Steroids and is well-known in the world of web design and search engine optimization.Hosting
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Wise Words: Analyse Keywords For Better Website Positioning

Good analysis and research is the main criteria when it comes to sorting out your keywords. Easier said than done though in the great majority of cases. Engaging an expert is possibly one of the best moves you'll make, as they'll run rings around any amount of work you'll do on your own. The difference between the best keyword analysis software and the freebees can be colossal. The best tools will unearth some real eye openers you'll never have thought about.

One elementary yet very common mistake is to gather together a bunch of keywords and to copy them across an entire website. This will drastically reduce the effectiveness of pages. If instead you focus and carryout research upon 2 to 5 words per page the results are likely to be much better.

It's worth remembering that keyword spellings can obviously vary from country to country. If we consider some of the most outstanding differences between English speaking nations such as England, the US and Australia, a whole new batch of keywords may be worth further analysis. Not only are spellings possibly different but also entire words will have their alternatives (eg pavement and sidewalk). Complete phrases may also be regularly used and understood in one country but not in another. Particular phrases can even vary greatly on a much more local level, especially if we consider popular sayings and slang. That said one of the best policies you can adopt is to check your keywords regularly. All things web related tend to change fairly quickly. What works today could be desperately out of line tomorrow. Once you feel you have a good set of keywords together, you'd be best advised to carryout some basic search engine tests. Testing will illustrate:

* If keywords are correct for the niche of the page concerned.
* Competitiveness of keywords and the strength of the competition.
* If sites ranked for particular keyword searches are really competitors or have any relationship to the area in which you compete.

OK, now's the time to hit you with a big one Latent Semantic Indexing otherwise referred to as Latent Semantic Analysis. Gosh where did that one suddenly come from? Well it's possibly too much to adequately detail in this brief article, but worth mentioning nevertheless. If you want to get serious about your keywords and SEO in general, then some additional research around LSI will do you the world of good. Wikipedia lists LSI as a "technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, of analysing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms". Well no one ever said it was simple, but basically from a search engine performance point of view we are interested in the relationship, grouping, positioning and variation of terms. Occasionally the right mix can just be stumbled across but most web designers wouldn't really be aware they'd got it right or wrong. First understanding and then using this mix intelligently can set your pages leagues ahead of the competition.

As pointed out at the start it's perhaps best leaving the whole business of SEO and keywords to the experts. This is assuming you can find someone who's competent and has your best interests in mind. If your budget is only small or you site performs so badly that anything is an improvement, then the best advice is to keep it simple. Sorting out your keywords for a site that has previously coped reasonably well without will make a big difference. Don't expect overnight success. The top search engines move at their own pace, so it's not uncommon for site modifications to take several weeks to filter through to an improvement in search positioning.

This article is free to republish provided the resource information remains intact

Paul Coupe is lead designer / developer with Zoom Online.Index
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