seo is easy

A couple days ago I posted about how to get traffic from search engines using images. As a follow up to this I have a very imformative video done by Peter Linsley who works for Google. Peter using slides and goes over some of the basics about image search such as:

* Images often appear in the universal search. Another excellent reason to use images as much as possible.

* Images can appear in maps and in all of Googles online properties such as at panoramio.com which is owned by Google.

* Images have a unique search behaviour. This is because when you do an image search you are looking for a certain image usually and not information. Your eyes will instantly absord all the images on the page and being ranked at the top doesn’t have as much importance as in the web search because you may instantly focus on an image in the lower left hand corner if it catches your eye.

* Image search is also very subjective by nature, because as Peter uses as an example: If you do a search of “waterfalls” the image of what a waterfall should look like might be different than what others think. So, it is because of this that often searchers go much deeper in the image results than they normally would with the universal search or web search. You can consume the results very quickly so this also adds to searchers tending to go deeper into the results.

* Novel search uses such as a way to get ideas, inspiration, shopping, research, health queries or just to kill time. Another interesting use of image search is as a visual dictionary.

Peter then talks about how image search works. Basically the website pages get crawled by spiders looking for images. Once they find them they classify them into different types of images which then can be useful in the filters used heavily in image search. After they are classified they are indexed.

Peter then goes into how webmasters can use image search the best. He says the best way is to focus on the user and try to understand what they are looking for. He also talks about setting up your landing page so once they do click on your image they will have a lot of good content to keep their attention. Plus, take high quality pictures, put the good content above the fold and also use descriptive text.

He ends the video with a Q&A he had when he did a live presentation.

Overall, a very interesting and useful video that should help you with your image search seo.

I stumbled upon this a few years ago after buying a couple of established tattoo design web sites with many images. After having the sites for a while I checked the traffic stats and noticed traffic Google images. Not just a little traffic either. I would say over 50 percent of the traffic from Google was from their image search.

At that time, I was not even aware that Google had image search. I never used it before so it went unnoticed. So, after seeing the traffic stats of my tattoo design sites, I went to the image search and searched looking for my web sites in the results. After a few different trys I found my site ranked very highly for some keywords.

That is the important part to remember about image seo, you have to tag the images with keywords just as you do for other content like say blog posts. I use word press blogs for many of my sites and wordpress makes it super easy to tag your images.rnrnBefore you ad an image there is something else you need to do. Use the adwords keyword tool or some other keyword tool and do some research to see which terms get searched and which ones you want to target. This is the same as doing any other keyword research except you have to keep in mind that it is images that are going to be searched.

Now, not every niche can use images effectively. For example, the SEO niche is one where I can not think of an image that is related to it. However, some niches are perfect for getting traffic from image search. In fact I would say the large majority of niches can use images very effectively.

Make sure you use images that you have the right to use. One place to find good images is a site like istockphoto where you can pay as little as one dollar for quality photos. Another place to get images is flickr where you can get good photos for free. You must make sure these photos can be used first though. Check what they call the creative commons license for each photo. Many of the photographers will just ask for you to attribute the image to them.

The best way to get an image is to create it yourself. One of the easist is to use a digital camera and take your own photos. This way, nobody else will have the image and it will be even more likely to get picked up by the image search and rank high.

So, now start using images when you add content to your web sites. Do the important keyword research and add tags to the images. Then check the traffic stats and see what happens. I think you will be happy with the results.

Here’s a good article for new marketers:

Understanding The Concept Of Search Engine Optimization:-

By: Marcus

Search Engine Optimization is a natural or rather an organic way of ensuring that your website comes out on top when some one searches for a particular product or a particular keyword.

The objective of Search Engine Optimization is to increase your web visitor counts by ranking your site very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

This relative ranking is often viewed as a struggle to make the best use a few keywords, instead of a struggle to out-do your competition. If you search on your target keywords, you will see the leading site in the rankings. All you need to do is to be better than that number one site.

There are no Search Engine Optimization secrets, just ranking and placement methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords. SEO training, content and link services are just one small part.

Search engine optimization is one of the leading Internet marketing methods used today.

More often than not what happens is that the faster or earlier a site is displayed in the search results the more the higher it will be ranked thereby increasing greatly the probability of a searcher visiting that site.

Search Engine Optimization not only makes use of keywords, although that is the most popular method of conducting Search engine optimization processes, it can also carry out different kinds of searches including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical searches.

As a marketing strategy utilized primarily for increasing a site’s ranking, Search Engine Optimization will take into account how search algorithms work and what exactly do people search for.

Search Engine Optimization efforts would involve a number of things such as a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, in addition to fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a given site.

In the mid-1990s with the emergence of the dotcom boom, Webmasters and content providers first started optimizing sites for search engines.

At the same time the first search engines were attempting to catalog the early Web. In those days a webmaster just needed to do to submit a page, or a URL, to the various engines. These search engines would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and then finally return information found on the page to be indexed and catalogued.

The process primarily involved a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server. Once that had been done a second program, known as an indexer, would extract various information about the page, like the key words it contained and where these were located. The information was then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

With time Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for search engine optimization service providers to proliferate in the market.

Search engine optimization is one of the most popular techniques today and is considered second best only to the Pay per click advertising programs that are slightly faster in bringing in traffic.

Ideally a combination of both should be utilized for optimum results.

Author Resource:-> Marcus is a senior Search Engine Optimization Consultant with Thagodz a Columbia based PPC Search Engine marketing company specializing in Search Engine Optimization services.

Submitted By ArticleUnited.com

Article From HTTP Articles

Good article about getting results from your seo work.

SEO That Gets Results

By: Helen Walker

Any business understands the importance of being found. If someone can’t find your company, then they are not going to employ your goods or services. Online visibility is no different, but may be even more difficult. The art of being found online is the basis of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO consists of a long list of do’s and don’ts that a online business owner or webmaster should follow closely in order to become popular in search engine results. There are many skeptics of SEO that haven’t got the patience or knowledge to master the web and its spiders, so they either miss out or hire an SEO firm to execute a campaign. If you don’t have the time or know-how to complete an entire campaign, here are three SEO first steps that will give you results.

1. Keywords. Keyword selection is a primary focus for any SEO campaign, and one of first things you should do. Using a few basic tools, an SEO professional can find keyword term potential for your business that customers are already using to find services and products similar to yours. They will be relevant to your business. If you sell diapers, you aren’t going to have “duel exhaust” as a keyword. This may seem obvious and easy, but you can use combinations and variations of keywords that will can be more efficient to your search.

2. Website/CMS. Do you invite guests over to your house if it is an utter mess or in disrepair? I hope not. Why would you invite people to shop your website if it is still under construction or looks completely unprofessional? Customers will only chuckle and click their way to your competitor’s site. There are plenty of content management systems out there, the best being Drupal, that are easy to use and produce a very user-friendly experience with a nice layout, great features and tools that make it easy for the dollars to flow.

3. Search Engine Results. Unless you are Google himself, you most likely will not get THE top ranking in Google search. I just want to be honest from the beginning. That doesn’t mean, however, that you won’t get on the first page. Getting ranked on the front page of your keywords can be done with keen on-site optimization: keyword rich text, meta tags, title tags, and image and video optimization. You will also need relevant, quality external links that point back to your site.

Unless you have more time than tumbleweed in Texas, hiring SEO professionals to help implement a campaign is going to be the best thing you can do for your online business. They will know how to execute these services with their eyes closed, as well as know how to avoid all the mistakes that can hurt your rankings. Volacci is the leading Drupal SEO company and very passionate about your online success. By the end of your contract you will have at least as much additional business from your web site as you spend on our services… or we’ll work for free until you do.

Volacci.® Your Profit. Our Passion.

Author Resource:-> Ethan Luke. search engine optimization - Volacci is a search engine optimization company focused on providing the best SEO, PPC management, and site consultation.

Article From HTTP Articles

Using Squidoo and HubPages for Building Links to your Site

By: Andrew Strauss

There are a lot of techniques for building incoming links to your site but I believe that no link building campaign is complete without the use of Squidoo Lens and HubPages Hubs. For people who haven’t heard about these two sites, Squidoo and HubPages are highly popular social media sites that offer an amazing opportunity to build high quality contextual links.

If you have been building backlinks for your sites, then you must be knowing that traditional link building methods like directory submission, social bookmarking, blog commenting, reciprocal links, etc. sometimes do not provide results that you are looking for, specially if you are targeting a highly competitive set of keywords. While these techniques are a must to get your search engine rankings up, you must also use Squidoo lenses and HubPages to build high quality and relevant links.

There is a flood of social media sites but out of all the social media, Squidoo and HubPages offer the kind of contextual backlinks that Google and other major search engines tend to prefer now a days. In order to build links from these sites, all you need to do is just join these sites for free and post your uniquely written articles about your site. Within the articles, you can use the keywords as anchor texts to link back to your own site.

Link building with Squidoo is a lot easier than HubPages because Squidoo lenses offer you dofollow links whereas HubPages external links are nofollow. However there is a way, which allows you to get the external links to turn to dofollow. Apart from this one difference HubPages is pretty much same as Squidoo.

There are a great number of social media sites, which you can use for your link building campaigns but HubPages and Squidoo are two sites that are being utilized most by advanced level SEO experts. There is no limit as to how many lenses or hubs you can build so you can just build one page after another one and use these 2 sites for building unlimited number of high quality backlinks.

Author Resource:-> WebGainMedia, leaders in link building in India, offers high quality and proven link building services in India to get your site on top of the search results.

Andrew

link building India, link building services India

Article From HTTP Articles

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Learn How to Optimise Images For Improved Image Search Results
By Michael Hanna

One area that is often overlooked when promoting a website online is the traffic that can be generated through image searches. Websites like Google offer searchers the ability to search specifically for images and, depending on the site that is being optimised, putting a little effort into ranking highly in an image search can be less competitive yet still yield excellent boosts in traffic. This article is going to look at a few simple techniques that can be applied to images in order to help them rank as highly as possible in image searches.

Much like when performing traditional search engine optimisation content is by far the most important element to get right. It is vital first to make sure that the image and the keyword that you are optimising for are related. In addition to this search engines have a tendency to rank larger, high quality images higher when compared to small and/or lower quality images.

Once the image and keyword have been chosen the next step is to ensure it is labelled properly. First, ensure that the filename is appropriate; use the keyword/phrase in the filename rather than meaningless strings of characters. Search engines much prefer Keyphrase.jpg over DSC013342.jpg. In addition to this make sure that the image tags are all being used to their full potential. Both title and alt tags should be used to accurately state what the image is of (ideally by using a keyphrase) in order to both help the image rank higher and to enhance the pages usability for users that might be unable to display images.

Finally it is extremely important when optimising an image to remember that it is equally important to optimise the page that the website is located on as well. In general the stronger the page that the image is located on the higher the image will be able to rank. As such it is vital to employ solid SEO to the page; ensure that title/header/meta tags are all correctly used and that the keyword density is effective throughout the text. In much the same way that search engines lend extra weight to links that are located within the pages text (provided of course that the text and link are appropriately related to one another) so to does the text around an image impact positively or negatively on its rankings. By providing meaningful and keyword appropriate text alongside the image will help the images ranking in search engines. The content is also important in trying to ensure users look around the whole site. If someone finds an image and deems the rest of the page to be irrelevant they will most likely bounce straight back out of the site.

Optimising a website can be a time consuming task and as such it is sometimes best to employ website design or search engine optimisation specialist in order to achieve the best results possible.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Hanna
http://EzineArticles.com/?Learn-How-to-Optimise-Images-For-Improved-Image-Search-Results&id=2330279

To be honest, most webmasters don’t worry about validating their code as often as they should. Running validation through a service like: http://validator.w3.org/ is a great way to make sure that your website is readable by the search engines.

Validated code means that all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes is laid out the way it should be. If it’s all good, the spiders don’t miss things.

When I get a new webmaster as a client the first thing I suggest to them is to allow me to switch their site over to using a cascading style sheet (or CSS for short).

There are a thousand reasons for this, beyond loading faster and taking up less resources,it makes the page less cluttered with tags and font styles and allows the search engine spiders to really cruise through a site.

The page you are looking at right now is a table less CSS designed website that loads fast and is geared just towards making the search engines happy from a technical view point.

Now you might not think that page size matters much to search engines, but remember to get to your internal links, they have to “read” your whole site to find them. If your page is smaller they can do more crawling before the resources they have allocated for your site are exhausted.

Style sheets and clean code are a must for good readability and keeping the search engines happy.

Sitemaps are a value internal linking structure to your site. It also is very spider friendly and can increase the amount of pages indexed by the major search engines.

Google now offers a way to submit your own site map directly to their search engine. Go here to find out more: google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

There is a site out that is a fun parody on SEO, and it’s also a great place to get a XML site map generated for free. Go check out seo-sucks.com and use thier site map generator and have a few laughs.

Now every site should have a sitemap. This should just be a page that has all the urls on the site. Some sites like this one, use the menu as a sitemap as well.

Either way, if you don’t have links on your site to a sitemap or a page with all your links your missing out on a lot of search engine activity.

I would suggest learning a little more about your server stats by visiting a site like track-it-now, to find out how you can tell when the search engines have spidered your site map and site.

Another great way to build backlinks is the use of a Press Release. Like Article Submissions, a press release has the opportunity to be picked up and re-published on a wide variety of websites. Hence creating additional backlinks.

A press release is different from a standard article. A Press release is a News story about some event, some thing, or some one. It is a “news” story and must be written as such. In any news story or journalistic article, the basic WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and HOW needs to be addressed. Press releases also must be much longer than an average 250 –300 word article. A good press release will be a minimum of 500 words telling a complete story about the topic.

Yes webmasters you can write a press release.

Here are the basics of a good press release:

The Content of Your Press Release is crucial.

Remember the following points when writing your News press release.

Is your Press Release newsworthy?
The true reason of a press release is to tell the world a story or news. No Sales Hype, don’t try to make a sale, tell the story. The Who, What, Where, When , Why, and How.

Grab Attention in the headline and first paragraph.They should tell most of the story. Provide the details after the first paragraph.

Not everything is news. Think of your audience and write something they would want to read.

Make the Press Release create a visual image? Real life examples communicate the story.
Give the background details that are important to the story.

The Facts Ma’am Just the Facts. Don’t lie, Tell the truth. Avoid Hype, BS, exaggerations etc.

Use an angle.

Use active voice.

Don’t be wordy, write clearly and concisely
Don’t use unnecessary adjectives.

Beware of jargon.

Avoid the hype. The exclamation point (!) is your enemy.

Finally,
Your press release should end with a short paragraph that describes your company, products, service and a brief company history.

There are numerous Press release sites on the Internet. Each have some of their own guidelines. Get that press release submitted and get some additional traffic to your website as well a valuable backlinks.