March 26th, 2008
We've been properly labelling and tagging our images for years. Some of our websites get most of their visitors from Google Images.
Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.
As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.
Most websites publish their images like this:
<img src="/images/192a/986943.jpg" alt="image">
Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.
Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:
<img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" width="400" height="340" />
For bonus points link that image to a larger version of the same properly labelled image:
<a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a>
For extra bonus points put that image in a h5 tag with a proper caption, close to if not identical to the alt tag:
<h5><a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a><br />Fortron PFC ZEN fanless power supply</h5>
If all that sounds like a huge hassle - when you do it for every image - you are absolutely right. It is a huge hassle to optimize for Google images by hand.
Which is why we built the SEO Images (part of Foliopress WYSIWYG) plugin.
With SEO Images, all of the above is happens automatically.
You only need to give the image the correct name (words separated by hyphens) and upload to the correct directory.
Automatically all the rest is added to your image:
- alt tag
- thumbnail (whatever size you prefer)
- link to larger version image
- caption
- width and height
- lightbox
If you want a lot of visitors from Google Images, you only need to use SEO Images for a few months and you will have the rankings and the visitors to go with them.
Here are the Google Images result for our example from above, the Zen Power Supply. Of 107,000 images, spots one and two are from Foliovision.com. The large and the small version of that image.
SEO Images Google Images results
Why a few months? Historically indexing in Google Images is much slower than for the rest of Google.
Chris and Stephen, in the future, please keep our secrets to yourselves!
alec |
SEO |
December 9th, 2007
Just discovered an amazing bookmarklet from Aussie company Western Civilization, one of the original creators of CSS editing software. StyleMaster was always a little bit buggy processor intensive, expensive and complicated for me so I learned how to code CSS from scratch. I still think that's the best way to write CSS.
But the modern web is getting so complicated that we really need a better way to look at web pages to be able to figure out how they are put together.
Well WestCiv has really hit the ball out of the park with this one. They have a cross browser compatible javascript bookmarklet that will let you click and see all the CSS and structure for any element on a page. The bookmarklet, appropriately enough, is called Xray.
Read the rest of this entry »
alec |
WordPress |
October 26th, 2007
Stephen Spender of netconcepts put up a beautiful SEO weblog entry over at cNet.
He talks about the same old tired question of ecommerce websites badly organised for SEO with:
- image navigation
- image text
- badly formatted URLs
- session-cookie dependent content
- no content
All true, but old news. Spender suggests Web 2.0 has just made it worse. Perhaps. But the real value in the entry are in the two following screen shots.
The first is a tabbed web interface of a good looking Web 2.0 ecommerce site.
Standard tabbed Web 2.0 product page
So what? Well take a look at what's under those tabs, what's under the covers.
That's what you get with Javascript turned off.
All the content of all the tabs is right there on a single content rich web page.
One could even argue that there is too much content on this page.
It would be better to have these section under different URLs making five or six pages with cleverly crafted hard URLs with interlinking anchor text in as site subsection. All that''s possible too by turning Javascript off but would require even better programming.
But the single page approache is a very good start.
Product page courtesy of the Hobitat.
alec |
SEO |
June 21st, 2007
There are lots of ways to build incoming links.
For a small window of time (about six months until April of this year) sponsoring WordPress themes was a great way to get varied links from lots of different independent websites.
Of course these links wouldn't be going on top PR sites generally (custom themes) and you don't have control of the theme of the site.
On the other hand, you do have control over the anchor text, which is already not bad.
And previously it was quite inexpensive - you would pay about $40 or $50/link on a two sponsored link theme and around $70 to $100 for a single sponsored link theme.
Things have changed - most theme developers are pushing three sponsored links and are trying to get $100 or more per link.
With the inflation and feeding frenzy, a lot more lousy developers have thrown their hats into the ring, so there is an oversaturation of themes.
The developers all talk a good game of how they promote the theme on sites such as:
Unfortunately on all or most of these high PR authority sites, your sponsored link will be nowhere to seen. Just a link to download the theme and some jpegs of the theme.
The developers will also try to shout and scream about 450 downloads, 1037 downloads for past themes. But for link building number of downloads accomplishes nothing for you.
What you are interested in is the number of sites which use the theme and include the sponsored links. For the purposes of sponsored links, a single is much better as the end user is less likely to rip out the links. By the same token it would also be better if the links were discreetly nested and not in electric green (where they are likely to attract the attention of the site owner and his visitors and finally get ripped out). An exception could be made if your site is likely to go viral and has a very wide appeal. In that case, clicks from sponsored links might actually contribute to your business. For my regional websites, we are not looking for random clicks. It will never generate any business for my clients and the more discreet the sponsored links the better.
Read the rest of this entry »
alec |
SEO, WordPress |
May 30th, 2007
Philip Dow's Journler
Philip Dow is the developer of the very well received Mac PIM (personal information manager) Journler about donationware. His application Journler had an open donation policy for personal use. Contribute whatever you like. A single commercial use license was/is $25.
Phil is going full-time as a developer now and is starting to feel the pain - lots of downloads and good press, but not a lot of revenue rolling in.
Out of 580 registered users, Phil had received an average donation of $17. That makes a total of about $9800. But in the end, Phil feels that some are abusing the donation system.
Read the rest of this entry »
alec |
Business, WordPress |
April 17th, 2007
Documentation
You can read full documentation for the modern Wordpress version over here: Foliopress Embedded Page Menus.
The original Mambo version was much more limited than the current Wordpress version which basically feeds and washes and walks your dog for you, giving you menus in every nick and cranny of your website with more or less information.
But Mambo didn't need any help structuring a CMS. Mambo Embedded Page Menus were the backbone of the Calum Ross mortgage consulting site, a site which was more or less unchanged from 2004 to 2007, at the core of the Calum Ross Mortage Consulting team, doing millions of dollars of commissions per year.
Embedded Page Menus in Action at CalumRoss.com 1 January 2008
This plugin was tested with Mambo 4.5.1 and probably needs updating to work with current Mambo or Joomla. On the other hand, the plugin is very simple and leverages core Mambo functionality so it shouldn't be much trouble to update.
Installation
Installation is just like any Mambo module:
Download
mod_embeddedmenu.zip
Mambo Embedded Page Menus is a free download, no registration required.
But if you find Mambo Embedded Page Menus useful, please drop by and leave a link to a page of your site with Mambo Embedded Page Menus in action in the comments. Anchor text encouraged!
alec |
WordPress |
