Tracking the changing face of online media…..

Ever hovered your mouse over an image and wondered what the words were that popped up? Yeap you guessed it, this little descriptive pieces of text are known as ALT text or ‘Alternative text’. There are a number of reasons why you can use ALT text for search engine optimisation but there are also a number of practical reasons too. Screen readers than blind people use to browse the Internet with make use of them to identity what an image is displaying or what’s the name of your company read from the company logo. For screen readers to work correctly its highly important that when you are looking at inserting ALT tags you do it in the best way possible.

ALT tags can be used for search engine optimisation too, because the search engines look at a number of different page properties to work out how to rank the page correctly it important that we give search engines good content. A news story about a car release would rank well if all the properties on the page had related keywords included. If the ALT text of the image associated with the story also had the relevant keywords along with a description of the picture included it would provide more content and better describe the page to the search engines thus ranking it higher in natural results.

Because no search engine would ever reveal what algorithms use, it’s hard to say how much empahsis search engines place on ALT tags. It’s however widely noted that go some way to helping you rank a page well if the ALT tags are implemented correctly.

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Page descriptions in my opinion are one of the most important factors when it comes to attracting users to  your website through search engines. Yes search engines pay some attention to the content of a page descriptions so your keywords should be considered for search engine optimisation purposes. But this text which can be found under the page title in search results pages is the perfect way to advertise your website or business. The message must be in as many ways perfect for your target audience as it is for the search engines. You only get a limited time to make an impact on a user so your descriptions need to do the business.

Most search engines will spider your website and pages and look for the page description automatically and display it under the page title. The worst thing you can do is have a fantastic piece of content that’s relevant to the search a user has submitted but nobody will click on it because the description actually only lists your footer buttons because of bad configuration.

All descriptions should not exceed roughly 180 characters in length, after this all text is truncated and won’t be shown. It’s a hard job to think of relevant page descriptions that fit within the 180 character limit but it’s worthwhile if you think of the number of users that might hen click on your piece of content. Google and the other search engines will count the number of clicks your website gets based on certain searches so if your sitting in position 3 but getting double the amount of clicks than the position 2 website you can be confident that you’ll rise in the listings.

Sometimes search engines when they can’t find a page description will take the content from your first paragraph of copy. This is fine but you need to make sure that your first sentence sums up the page/story using as many keywords as possible.

I’ve drawn up a number of best practice points to look at when creating your own page descriptions. It’s well worth setting aside sometime to go through your entire site if it isn’t massive to ensure all your page descriptions are relevant and will attract users in the best possible way.

• Your page descriptions should be relevant and reflect what a user would expect to find on the page once they click though.
• It should try to include as many keywords relating to the content held on the page as possible.
• You should limit the character limit to 180 characters as the rest will just be truncated.
• Try to write descriptions that will be appealing to new users. User searching for certain topics might already know your brand and know what to expect, new users won’t have a clue.

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Meta data or keyword data as its also known has been bounded around as something that can substantially help you improve your search engine optimisation. I think that now this is very far from the truth although I’m sure it still does have a slight impact.

All search engines index billions of websites, it used to be the case that search engine spiders struggled to know what a page was about. Meta data helped search engines go some way to understanding what a site or a page was about. The standard definition of meta data is quite simply data about date. Meta data helps the search engines describe and categorise pages.

This method of indexing used to be heavily used by the search engines but as webmasters started to understand the technology and started abusing it. Webmasters would pack pages with irrelevant meta data tags in the hope to grow their rankings. This caused the search engines to shift their policy, they now place much less relevance on them in deciding the overall page rank of a website or a single page.

Despite the apparent reduction in relevance of meta data it should still be taken seriously. Like everything in this search engine optimisation 30 day guide its not 100% known by anyone how important each factor is but by combining them all you can set yourself up for the best possible change of a good search ranking. Meta data should always if possible relate directly to the content of a page including keywords linked to the main theme or titles. Most content management systems will generate these keywords automatically but if you are building pages from scratch make sure you include them.

Meta data sits in the html coding of the website, normally in the first quarter, as you can see from the example below taken from this BBC news story - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/us_elections_2008/7707581.stm

<meta name="keywords" content="BBC, BBC News, US Election 2008, US Election 2008 news,
United States Election results news, America election news, Barack Obama, John McCain,
Sarah Palin, Joe Biden, presidential candidate, election campaign" />

Always worth checking before you publish a page that the meta data is as accurate as possible. You never know what search engines will do in the future and it might become something that’s looked on quite favorably by the search engines when they next update their ranking algorithms so better to be safe than sorry.

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Enough said really…

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Just a quick update, I’m currently 2 posts behind schedule on the search engine optimisation 30 day guide. We are currently on the 4th November but I’ve only posted an Introduction to search engine optimisation and an article on URL structure due to having a very heavy work schedule.

Hopefully I’ll catch-up tonight and get articles on Meta data and page descriptions up.

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People often underestimate how important URL’s are in the overall search engine optimisation strategy of a website. It’s pretty much a given now that a clear, concise and logical URL structure will help with your sites overall SEO because like humans Google and the other search engines prefer content to be logically structured so that its easy to index and understand it.

Site URL’s

URL’s or Uniform Resource Locators as they are know in their more techy guise help direct users to servers across the Internet where websites live. Although there is no solid proof from Google or other search engines that a URL’s such as

www.indiantakeaway.com

performs better than a URL like

www.indian5647sads.com

It can be seen all over the Internet that a URL that contains words that are relevant to the content of a website will rank higher than a domain name that includes no relevant words. Obviously there are major factors about the on page technology and coding with help with how search engines view a site and the type of content it holds and these will be looked at over the coming weeks.

Section URL’s

Once you have picked your main URL the issue of optimisation doesn’t stop there, the actual URL structure of how selections of content are grouped also plays an important role. Taking the example of a URL such as the one above: www.indiantakeaway.com/london would be better placed in Google for searches of Indian takeaway restaurants in London than a URL such as www.indiantakeaway.com/325 if both the pages held the same content.

I always tend to look at a website like a massive filling system, all content including images should be filled correctly to help not only people but search engines locate content. By employing a URL structure that’s logical and relevant you will be going a long way to helping promote your site via natural search.

Most content management systems like Joomla and Drupal enable you to easily setup these structure in order to get the most out of your site with relation to hows its ranked.

Individual pages

Individual pages on a website will also substantially help with the ranking of your pages. Again using the example of the Indian takeaway website above the URL www.indiantakeaway.com/london/chutneys.html will perform better than www.indiantakeaway.com/325/45461.html

This is based on a number of different factors. Firstly the search engines will relate a search phrase to a specific URL. So a Google search for ‘Churneys Indian takeaway London’‘ would relate very closely to the optimised URL of www.indiantakeaway.com/london/chutneys.html.

The second factor in the importance of the URL structure of pages of sections is how these URL’s appear in search results pages. A URL like www.indiantakeaway.com/london/chutneys.html would be more appealing to me than www.indiantakeaway.com/325/45461.html because I would have an expectation of what I would be seeing once I landed onto the page. Google and other search engines use the number of clicks a search result gets to rank the website so by appealing directly to customers you can climb further up the rankings.

This post if part of the search engine optimisation 30 day guide

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This is the first post in a series of 30 looking at search engine optimisation, further information about this guide and the reasons behind it can be seen in this search engine optimisation 30 day guide. So what exactly is search engine optimisation then? There are many definitions depending who you talk to, online marketers, developers, editors and search engine optimisation companies will all give you a slightly different view point but there is an over riding goal.

I would define search engine optimisation as:

The process of changing and constantly optimising pages using a number of methods to ensure these pages are increasing their ranking in natural search listings across the various search engines including Google, MSN, Yahoo and others.

The fact of the matter is that Google pretty much dominates the market with 8 in 10 searches occurring across its .com and regional search portals its the main search engine that should be considered when looking at search engine optimisation. The way Google works out the ranking of each page and the order that it appears in results is a closely guarded secret. Apparently only a few people aware of the full scope of factors so its at best a guessing game to stay ahead of your competitors. Google and the other search engines update their search engine algorithm on a random basis so there can sometimes be some dramatic changes in listings which is where search engine optimsation or its more commonly known term SEO come in.

Google has changed search forever

Through trail and error and some help from Google on how to best build your site there is a general online concencous in relation to a number items you can look at to improve your search engine ranking and this guide will detail them on a daily basis through November. The SEO factor in website design and development should never be underestimated. A website that has been fully optimised and can be found on the first page of a Google search might make millions more in revenue due to its exposure to consumers than a website that’s sitting on page 3 of the search results.

This post if part of the search engine optimisation 30 day guide

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As I mentioned in my previous post I’ll be using November to focus on search engine optimisaiton and posting a detailed article on an individuals topics each day. 2 days into November and I’ve still not uploaded anything! Bad I know but I’ve been away this weekend, from tomorrow you can expect the first 3 days worth of articles to be uploaded but in the mean time here is the topic list.

• Introduction to search engine optimisation.
• URL structure
• Meta data
• Page descriptions
• ALT text
• Images
• Page titles
• H tags
• Landing pages
• related content pages
• Local pages
• Indexing
• nofollow
• Semantic search
• Tagging
• Search engines
• Sitemaps
• search engine marketing and ROI
• Social bookmarking and inbound links
• Flash
• Frames
• Navigation
• Javascript
• Keyword density
• Forms
• Can PPC help?
• Algorithms
• Page rank
• Webmaster tools accounts and how they can help.
• The future of search engine optimisation.

Come back tomorrow for the first batch of articles.

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Google Reader revolutionised the way I consume my online media, I was regularly visiting over 50 websites per day until I managed to get all their RSS feeds plugged into Google Reader and link it to my Google account. I now have it set as my home page which quickly allows me to see what’s been happening in seconds rather than minutes. I also have the Google Reader application installed on my iPhone which provides great public transport distraction.

Over at the Google Reader blog they have posted an update on a cool bit of functionality they have released. The new functionality allows users to chart the actual posted articles by a source against those that you have read. Its a great way in my opinion to view how quickly you consume news from a site but at what time and day of the week.

If you’ve ever been curious about when your favorite subscriptions were publishing new posts or when you were reading them, click the “show details” link in the upper right corner of the viewer. It’s a good way to peak into your personal habits as well as the posting schedule of your favorite blogs. While you’re in there, check out the other details - we also display the last crawl time and any errors encountered during that crawl.

Google Reader stats

Google seem to be loving data at the moment and releasing little addons across all their platforms. We want more please.

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