All posts tagged ALT

Visitors happens to be one of the most important components of your online business, without which, it’s impossible to use whatever positive results. A great way to receive plenty of traffic is to understand what appeals to search engines so people will find your site more easily. Unfortunately, rather than working on legitimate techniques to appeal to search engines, some Internet marketer’s aim at fooling them. Then these marketer’s tend to be surprised when their own sites suddenly get banned by the big search engines, like Yahoo or Google! However besides that, some webmaster’s get into unethical methods unknowingly. In each case a lack of knowledge could be ascribed as the cause of such bad choices. While it is good to learn new Search engine optimization tactics, you also need to know which ones you should avoid. Let’s look at some of the more major Search engine optimization mistakes you should try to steer clear of. You should focus on search engine optimization and keywords.

Images do enhance the look of your site, but simply like too many cooks spoil the food, getting too many images isn’t good. In fact, you could reduce your search engine ranking positions by having too many graphics and not enough content, which is what the search engines like Google are looking for. Plain text in your pages might appear boring, but it has a far greater effect on your own results than textual content showing on images. Any kind of text you have displaying within images can not be read by the search engines like Google, which means they can’t use those words for SEO purposes. If you do use graphics, be sure to put your chosen key phrases within the ALT attribute for each image. Search engines like Google are able to read your ALT attributes, therefore having your keywords inside can assist your position in the long run.

The 2nd big mistake is internally linking your pages wrong. You have complete control over your internal linking and need to use that opportunity to make it work in your favor. Not only will your web web pages rank higher, which results in more traffic but you will make your site more user friendly to its site visitors. It is even common for online marketer’s to overlook internal linking and focus more on sending the visitor off someplace else. Truthfully, you probably won’t find another SEO technique which will give you such throughout good results. And what makes it so great is that these are permanent results, not temporary. Look at Wikipedia; even though it has a lot of external links, it’s smartly inter-linked all the articles, which obviously provides the site the link fruit juice it needs.

Never just turn your head to the guiding advice offered by the search engines.

You should go through these guidelines very carefully to make sure that you avoid any bad SEO practices that will get you punished through the search engine. The search engines are always changing their guidelines so make sure you check out the updates as often as you can so you can stay in their great graces. A good example of this really is Google as they alter their algorithm all the time, and that’s why it’s important to be familiar with those changes so that you can rank up to possible.

All in all, just be sure your site is not seriously based on flash so when you have images in your site, don’t forget to make use of the ALT tag. If you can avoid committing the above blunders, you will avoid the ban and will obtain indexed higher than actually with the search engines.

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I love testing and tracking to see what factors can improve or worsen a situation. So, it was only natural for me to track the moves of a little experiment I did involving SEO copywriting recently. I’ll gladly share my findings with you.

Before I do, however, I want to make a couple of things very clear. The outcome of this experiment will not be the same for every keyphrase on every page of every site. There are too many unknown factors at play in the overall SEO equation. Not to mention, all keyphrases are not the same, and all sites are not the same. In addition, this experiment takes no account of link popularity, which is a huge factor in achieving high rankings. With that said, let me show you how I took the home page of one of my sites – that didn’t even rank in the top 50 – and caused it to rank in the top 10.

First of all, I’m not a big fan of checking rankings on a regular basis. I don’t run ranking reports for all my sites to be sure they are all in the positions I want them in for every given keyphrase. I’ll do it from time to time just to satisfy my own occasional curiosity. This experiment began when I noticed the home page of one of my sites was ranking highly for a keyphrase that didn’t seem to appear anywhere in the text. Upon further investigation, I saw that the keyphrase was included in the ALT tags (a.k.a. image attribute tags) and that it was also included in the title tag.

I knew ALT tags previously carried a lot of weight with the engines, but had been downgraded in importance because site owners had badly abused the tag. Had ALT tags been reinstated in their level of importance? I decided to find out.

Keyword #1 was currently in the ALT tags and the title tag, so I decided to eliminate the keyword in the title tag. This would let me see if the ALT tags alone could hold the position in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To make things more interesting, I also decided to research and find a keyword that was a little more competitive and insert it into the title tag. On the same day I removed Keyword #1 from the title tag, I inserted Keyword #2. My home page was not ranked in the top 50 at that time for Keyword #2.

A few days later, the Googlebot came by and boosted my home page to position #18 for Keyword #2. Not bad! The page fell one spot (from #17 to #18) for Keyword #1 since the removal of the phrase from the title tag.

Keep in mind, these are not the most competitive keywords ever known. They each got between 100 to 200 searches a day. Also, the home page of this particular site had been (and still is) well ranked for years for other keyphrases and had a positive legacy with Google.

Five days later, Keyword #2 was moved up three notches to a ranking of #14 while Keyword #1 stayed the same. Things remained in their status quo for roughly 10 days and then began to shift again. Keyword #1, the original that was previously in both the ALT tags and the title tag, vanished completely. It was not found in the top 50. Keyword #2, that was only found in the title tag and nowhere else, dropped to position #25.

Four days later, Keyword #2 was back up in the rankings and was now at #16. To see if I could improve rankings further, I began to make small tweaks to the page attributes. I added Keyword #2 to the ALT tags (taking the places where Keyword #1 had once been), and I also added Keyword #2 to the body copy. The keyphrase was added to one, bold sub-headline and at three places within the body copy: none of which were above the fold. It was not added to any primary headlines that used tags, and no keyword density formula was followed for the body copy. No other pages on my site used this term as anchor text in links pointing to the home page. That gave the page keyword placement in the:

? Title tag

? ALT tags

? Body copy

Seven days later, the home page hit the top 10 for Keyword #2!

So, what does all this mean? Simple. There is no single primary factor in search engine rankings. It takes balance, testing and tracking to find out what works for your particular pages. Your best bet is to do exactly what I did? begin one step at a time and track your progress. Did something cause a positive movement? Keep it. If something causes a negative shift, take it out.

I’m not finished with this page yet. I’ll keep trying different things from time to time just to see what happens. Maybe I’ll add anchor text links from the internal pages to the home page. I might try writing articles with keyword-rich anchor text links to help boost the rankings more. There are many acceptable practices I can implement for this page (or any page) that will allow me to observe the shifts in ranking. As the old saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” A diversified approach to SEO copywriting that includes tags, copy and links is always a wise start down the road to top 10 rankings.
by SEO Copywriting Services