Hey guys. Okay so the story is this. Basically back in the summer I started a wordpress blog with demotivational posters. Nothing serious, I just have never used wordpress so I wanted to try it out and get a feel of working with it and customizing it (I code php), plus practice some SEO with it and what not. Anyways, I was kind of an idiot and posted stuff on it for a week or two but then stopped because I lost interest and had other things going on. I regret that a lot as after that fact a ton of them popped up, and looking back now I had 2000-3000 daily visitors with very little content and no optimization, I could have made it big. But what's done is done, live and learn. I am confident that I can still put together a better site than most of these other ones that have been started. I have decided to start fresh, since there was so few content on it and I hacked it up a bit when I was playing around with the code. Now again this was kind of a mistake because I didn't realize it but there were people linking to it and tons of search results indexed. But again what's done is done I got rid of the database (still have all the pictures though). Now let's get started on the optimization. First of all the URL is www.unmotivate.com so have a quick look. I started it up yesterday. 1) What do I do with the old links? I want to fix what I can here. For example if you go to http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&q=hood+rich&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title you see my poster at the top, but it's missing. Since I started with the new database, the post numbers won't match up so there is no point trying to fix that (it will get re indexed when I rehost them I guess), but should I maybe just put the whole "pictures" folder back the way it was, so at least that's there? Would it help at all? I have no idea what to do here. 2) What is the best way to do with the images? Does it matter, for SEO, how they are structured on the server? For example in my old site I had them all in one folder, in umotivate.com/pictures/ where I just uploaded them all in FTP. Now I tried just uploading them through wordpress, so it organizes them in like wp-content/uploads/2008/09. DOes that matter at all, or no? Does it matter if I upload it through wordpress of through ftp? Because to be honest I kind of prefer the FTP way so I will go with that if it makes no difference..I just want to decide now and stick with it so I have no more missing links problems. And, I am titling the images to include the description. Before I jsut had the title, say epicboobs.jpg, but now I put more in it like so: fuck_off_the_perfect_response_to_im_pregnant.jpg... This is good for SEO right? And I put that same title as well, liek fuck_off_the_perfect_response_to_im_pregnant. And for alternate text I have it written properly like: Fuck off - The perfect responose to I'm pregnant. Is this all fine? ANy ways to improve? 3) This bring on my next point, the "text" optimization. I really, really wanted to just put the whole title AND description thing in the title to get more SEO "brownie points" but I think it kind of kills the funny, when it's all layed out before you see the pic. SO i stuck with just titles, no description in the title so the viewers enjoy it more. Is this okay? Will all my alt image tags and whatnot for the actual picture make me get good results? Or what can I do here? I have TONS more questions, such as the permalinks, but this already an essay in itself so I will stop here. First off I really appreciate jsut taking hte time to read, any responses would be great, espeically if they answer my specific concerns (as that's what I'm having trouble with) but other general help is good as well. Thanks!!!!! Feel free to comment on the site btw. I haven't done much so far though. Going to add RSS feed and mailing list feature, make the pagination nicer, etc later.
By the way, will google penalize me for the missings links? I hope it simply re-crawls the site and fixes it, I don't want to drop in rankings .
you can do that with your permalinks for each blog post. also build some back links for each individual posts.
No google will not penalize any site for 404 errors. As far as other questions are concerned,don't overdo anything. I mean keeping simple image names something-something.jpg is fine but naming_them_like_this_is_not_cool.jpg , Alt tag is very important in image, so use it properly. Its good that you are using wordpress which is a great cms/blogging platform. Also make sure you keep title small and relevant with as little unwanted keywords as possible. Avoid of, the,an etc stop words. I had written 2 articles few weeks back, Common SEO Mistakes and Best Title Tags, they should help you.
Thanks. I appreciate your reply. May I ask why you say that "naming_them_like_this_is_not_cool.jpg". Why isn't it cool ? Will it harm the rankings? I was looking on icanhascheezburger for inspiration as they seem to know what they're doing, and for every picture, they call it this: funny-pictures-word1-word2-word3-word4. So they have the funny pictures in every pic, and then 4 or 5 words to describe it. I was going to make mine like that too. Do you think it's going overboard? Please have a look at my site and tell me if you think it's bad... Thanks
Well normally image names this long may be considered too spammy as its not natural. I mean in your site if 5 out of 500 images have this kind of name, its understandable but if all 500 have this kind of name, it will surely raise some kind of flag. Google may think that the site is partially automated and is built to get higher search engine rankings. I really don't see any reason why you should name your images like this ? image-name.jpg should be enough. Use alt tags properly too which as important as image name. And really don't focus too much on image traffic. It should not be your first priority unless you are having image related website.