I have done a little SEO research prior to and while building pimpmaspace.com this spring. I did all of the usual: title tags, meta (keywords and description) on every page. The entire site is also coded tableless with css; it loads very quickly and validates. There are few pages that are served dynamically, such as this page Myspace Graphics and Myspace Layouts the rest are static. Each page has the proper heading tags, and short descriptions. Keyword relevence for the term "myspace layouts" is 6.78%. To my knowledge anywhere between 5 and 7% is optimal. My ad relevence is decent, but not the greatest on pages other then the index. I dont want to make up false descriptions just to get more keywords, because that doesn't make sense from a browsing point of view... at least to me. I described each code, generator the best way I could. Graphics, and layouts are pretty self explanitory. Each layout is named by catagory, and then by it's name. I searched overture keywords for the most searched "myspace layouts" and added those to the list of avaliable layouts. What else can I do to optimized the site better? I was thinking of expanding the news seciton on the front page and describing my content a little better. Posting new tools, layouts and such like that with links to those items on my site. Also, on the dynamic pages, such as the page serving graphics should I use something like a breadcrumb navigation so that google won't get stuck indexing it and it will go thru all of the graphcics, and or layouts? Because right now the only way to return to the graphics section upon clicking a graphic is clicking the image you are viewing. I used a small line of JS to make the persons browser go back to what they were viewing. Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks, Ferrarislave
ferrarislave, From a content perspective, theres alot you can do. SEs, especially google are trying to be more analytical about content itself, so here some things I've picked up over the years from designers. Hopefully others here will back me up or shoot me down and refine my knowledge in the process. Make careful use of heading tags. You use images which doesnt tell an indexer what the content is about. Validly written content is work in such where a heading tag is followed by paragraph text. Search heywords in heading and the backed up in the paratext achieves a high ranking due to it be directly related 'subject matter'. I have only heard this in the grapevine so I'm hoping for clarity here, but I've heard that using divs over span tags is more optimal. and... ...using nested tables is something indexers dont like. Use a spider simulator and see what bulk text the indexer pulls out. Ive used this one in the past, but Ive seen other spider simulators behave differently so Id also like any clarity available on this one. (live links apparently are allowed here, so) Goto webmaster-toolkit.com and visit their spider simulator I've seen this a few times with sites that the simulator shows only the footer from the homepage which is a disastor. Rebuild the site using all divs, and the indexer happily crunched away on everything it could find. Maybe this has to do with how many levels from the root (body) the indexer wants to traverse before giving up. Note: you're already making use of divs instead of tables so kudos to you, but Im more fishing for confirmation on this one. If you really want to use images as headings, be sure to use your alt tag to explain at least a bit what they mean. Aditionally all links should have alt tags as well that wrap images. Not sure which is picked up if both image and anchor have an alt. Probably outter? I was doing some research on sandboxes and came across this site and saw your post... THought maybe it was time to step out of the shadows.
Thanks for the post Paz75, I really appreciate it. All headings on the site that use images have a text-indent of -1500px with a true heading description. So if you were a spider you would still be able to read each heading as if it were visible to you as a reader/browser. I am most concerned about the dynamic pages... Such as the graphics, and layouts pages. Any recommendations on those?
Hi Ferrarislave, Please find below some of my suggestions to optimize your site. 1. First of all, domain name is a very important factor, your domain name does not have a very high relevance with "myspace layouts". If you have a chance to grab a better domain, go for it If not, don't despair, read on 2. You have done most of the things right so things should turn out as expected (good SERP). However, the most important factor about SEO is Content Freshness. Do update your content often so as to encourage frequent bots visit. Include News Feed from other sites if you have no time for new content. 3. Regarding the graphics and layouts section, i noticed that you did not use <img> tag but rather, you use CSS background.. IMO, this is very bad for your site.. The reason is because you miss out the most important attributes for images indexing- alt. Your current filename also does not help Search Engine to recongise what images are those. My advise is to use <img> tag to display the images and include alt atrributes for every images. 4. In both Layout and graphics pages, include some text description on top to aid you in SERP. Currently, these pages do not have content for the spiders.. the bots only sees the Google ads and some internal links at the bottom. Keep up with the good design (Simple, Valid and Nice)
I see, what would help google crawl each image? Make links for "back' and "forward" when you click on an image? Right now the way my site works is when you view a catagory is gives you a list of the images with a small preview. If you click the image it gives you the image code, and if you click the image again you go back... List View: http://www.pimpmaspace.com/graphics.php/cat=46 Example viewing image + code: http://www.pimpmaspace.com/graphics.php/cat=149/id=8287 Also is there anything I can do to the php url's to aid in the SEO process?
Hi everyone........ I was reading everyones comments and they are really good, im not a computer wiz or anything like that (just a newbie) but i just recently moved up a good bit in my alexa rankings and am working on the site map. i used a site called http://www.widexl.com and it showed me what corrections to make to my site. I found it very helpful to me. I hope this site can help someone working on optimizing thier site. PS. ferrarislave i checked out your site its cool, i checked out your sitemap so as to get an idea of what mine should look like and it wouldnt come up you may want to check and see what the problem is.
My sitemap works, it's just the one that users can view that doesn't. I have to remove that link. I made a sitemap with gsite crawler.
The only way to let Google 'sees' your images is to use descriptive filenames and alt text. This is pretty bad.. the file names are not relevant (id, thumb.. etc). You may have a problem running into the SEO grey zone if you have a longer list with the same alt tags.. try to have a different alt description according to the images. It may sound tedious.. create a descriptive category and differentiate the images by names instead of numbers. All in all, indexing images is not easy especially with dynamic management. If you ask me, I would say that it is not worth going through the trouble to make the images fully SEO. My suggestion is to put your 90% SEO afforts into Content and the rest into images and misc (filenames, directory names etc).
I see, im that worried about the images and SEO, but what I will do is add some descriptive text to each catagory so at least my ads are relevent.