Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [51]
Figure 5-5: The original page with images loaded and the same page showing the alt attributes
Filenames
Filenames also help develop the overall context of the information. Filenames cover a wide gamut of information, including page names, images, documents, files, multimedia, and any other element contained on a page.
For instance, many people will add an image to a page and leave the filename intact. Many times it is the typical digital camera naming convention, such as DSC1100037373. Instead of simply uploading the image with the default image name, change the filename to be descriptive of what the image is. Figure 5-6 shows the results of a Yahoo! image search for the term laptops. The vast majority of images in Figure 5-6 contain the word laptop in the filename of the image, such as laptops.jpg. To improve the visibility of images on your site showing up in search results and image search results, be sure to rename the image.
Use this tactic in naming your website pages, PDFs, website images, downloadable files, and other elements that make up your website.
Figure 5-6: Yahoo! results for an image search of laptops
Wednesday: Optimize Content Structure for SEO
Many times, SEO advice seems to be given and implemented as a blunt force instrument. “Use this word, this many times, along with this many other words, etc.” Fortunately, search engine optimizing is less about trick formulas and forcing words into content and more about creating a consistent context of the information. Yes, utilizing keywords is important, but so is utilizing additional words and concepts that add to the understanding, content and development of your marketing message and the information that users need.
Use Headlines to Get Attention
My first attempt at building a website was amateur, to say the least. Coming from a journalism background, I used the page layout techniques that were familiar to me. By using the newspaper layout as a guide, my first website focused on the layout starting with the following:
Headline This informed the visitor about the page’s specific purpose.
Subheading Additional content was grouped into subheadings.
Captions Images were presented alongside a caption to explain the image.
Bullet Points These were used to present important content and sum up information.
Paragraph Headers These summarized the paragraph.
Although I was proud of my creation, I kept tweaking the layout and image placement and learning new techniques to display information. About that time, someone remarked to me that they found my website on Yahoo! It was number one in the results for a very good term. It didn’t take long to figure out the relationship between the term I was ranking for in Yahoo! and the content that was presented on my site. The page that was ranking was using the primary keywords in the headline, subheadings, captions, and paragraph headers. The words I used were from some simple keyword research and logical search behavior of my target audience.
From those early days, much has changed in the search engine algorithms, but the on-page factors have been consistent. Good layout in the code helps show the important concepts and terms on the page, because it differentiates the keywords in the headings from the regular text. Just as a headline grabs a reader’s attention, the
tag communicates to the search engine that the text in this tag is important, and it is more important than the other text on the page. The words in the tag are secondary in importance, and so on.
Simply having paragraphs of content on a page does not provide the search engine with the necessary information to distinguish which keywords are the most important or relevant on the page. The markup in the code helps communicate to the search engines the important phrases, just as the markup changes