Here's some basic SEO tips taken from: http://www.whooked.com/web-dev/707-seo-tips-tricks.html 1. Add meta description and meta tags. Yeah it's true that some search engines like Google don't care about meta data but it is still a good idea to have them. Meta description actually attracts traffic. Like meta description lets you give a nice little description of a page and it helps visitors to decide if they want to go to your site or not. You can add meta data by putting the following codes between your <head> & </head> <meta name="keywords" content="Put your keywords in here. Make sure you put relevant keywords and don't add a lot of them." /> <meta name="description" content="Put a nice little description of your web page here. Keep it short!" /> HTML: 2. Add alternate text in images. Why? People will know what the image is for, if the image gets deleted from the server or you wrote the wrong path. And search engines appreciate it. Here's an example: <img src="/images/mypic.gif" alt="This is a picture of me" /> HTML: 3. Do not make a site fully based on flash! That is a big no no! 4. Do not make a site fully based on images. Like even the text on your site is an image that was made in Photoshop for example. Search engines can't see pictures! They can only see text. 5. Search engines like quality content. Make sure that you don't copy/paste content from other sites. That will be considered as duplicate content, and it will kill your SEO! 6. Splash pages are not a good idea. Search engines don't like splash pages. Since most of the time it does not have any content and just has a nice button saying "enter" or something similar. 7. Google loves blogs! Why? Because blogs have the same structure through out the whole site and are updated more often. Google spiders index blog posts faster than web pages.
This is what I have been trying to convince my client for, also - I prefer wordpress, although other SEO's might disagree, but wordpress is much more preferred than blogpost.
I've heard that you can also slightly enhance the SEO value of your images by including a TITLE attribute to the IMG code. But even more importantly, doing so gives your readers more info (in the form of a tooltip when they hover their pointer over the image) and also makes your site a bit more friendly for the viewing impaired or those who use text-only browsers. And I always likewise include a TITLE attribute on my hyperlinks for the same reasons. Even if these don't do much for you on SEO, they're a very minimal amount of effort. Once you get into the habit of including this extra little bit of info, it becomes second nature. Rob
I use images for navigation on my blog, and I put the links to those pages in my footer as text links so search engines see it. It's one way to get around that. Good tips thanks for sharing.
I don't agree that Meta descriptions "attract" traffic. Yes, they are sometimes used in the SERPs but not usually. It's usually just some of the surrounding text. As for the images, yes, you definitely don't want to go heavy on the images because the search engines have gotten wise to keyword stuffing within the alt image tags. What does said article say about the important SEO strategies, the off-page ones? Sheree
You should always use title tags for images ad links, just don't spam your keywords in them. Make sure its actually what the image or link is about and hopefully it contains one of your keywords. It'll for sure help improve your SEO for those pages. ex: Don't post a title="Hot Asian Chick" then post a image of a fat white guy naked with spaghetti all over him.
Actually they do care about meta data. It's just the META keywords tag and those pointless tags that try to tell them when to do their jobs they don't give a hoot about. But it's still a good idea to include your META description and keywords tags anyway, even though the keywords tag is practically useless (except for some site search engines). Understand though that this uses XHTML syntax. If you're not using an XHTML DOCTYPE, remove the space and forward slash before the > character. Again, I'll repeat what I said about the syntax. Also, you're going to want to use absolute URLs instead of relative ones. The latter has been known to cause problems with the search engines in the past. Furthemore, "this is a picture of me" doesn't tell anything about the image in question, other than that it's you. Your name would be far more appropriate in this case. This has far more to do with accessibility and usability than SEO, but if the point needs to be made here to get into some of our more hard-headed members' thick skulls, so be it. And your credibility, and your reputation. Actually they could care less about splash pages. It's the fact that there's no content on them that causes them to be ineffective (that and people want what they're looking for yesterday, not after clicking a "Enter Here" link). Again, Google could care less here. It's not the fact that it's a blog that makes them rank well. It's the fact that they often have regularly updated content, and that most blogging software is set up to automatically "ping" the search engines to let them know that there's fresh served new content goodness for their spiders to gobble up like a starving person at a hot dog eating contest. See above. It's not preferred. It just happens to kick Blogspot's ass six ways to Sunday without breaking a sweat because it's a (generally) superior product. Slightly, yes. But it won't have any real noticable impact. Just use them as they were meant to be used and keep the people using the site as your primary audience, and you'll do well with them. See above. If anything, the former is an accessibility requirement while the latter is a usability benefit. Both though have a positive impact on SEO when used properly. You're better off using plain text actually. But if you want to use images, using CSS and background images is the way to go, such as this example by Paul O'Brien: http://www.pmob.co.uk/temp/navimagereplace.htm Images use the alt attribute to deliver alternate content about the image to the user if s/he can't see the image for whatever reason. Actually they can, and often do, if written properly. The objective is to write as accurate and actionable a description as possible for the specific page you are optimizing (note I said PAGE, not site) and tempt your SERP reader that your page is better than the others so they'll "click that link" rather than someone else's. Dunno, didn't read it. Your example is just flat out disturbing. You know that?
Yes, adding alt attribute to your images is a great help not only in your visitor but for spiders as well. You can have traffic via images once it is crawled and index.