SEO Basics Part 5

SEO Basics Part 1
SEO Basics Part 2
SEO Basics Part 3
SEO Basics Part 4
SEO Basics Part 5
SEO Basics Part 6
SEO Basics Part 7

Don’t Miss Any SEO Tricks

We are still on the front end structure of our website and hopefully you have magaed to digest what has been written so far. One of the major mistakes is that businesses in general think that they can either write, or have a website written, and it miraculously appears on page one with the search engines.

We all know that this doesn’t happen in the real world as you never get something for nothing and although SEO is not rocket science it just needs a little time and knowledge to implement it.

Website Images

Pictures paint an thousand words apparently and this is obviously appealing to users when browsing your site and gives instant eye candy. There are loads of mistakes made when using images and that seesaws between users and spiders but with the correct knowledge a simple balance can be achieved.

Have you ever considered how spiders view images? Well they don’t and whereas the image is appealing to the user the SEO benefit is zero unless you use “alternative text” commonly known as ALT Tags.

What Are ALT Tags

This is HTML tag that provides alternative text when non-textual content is used allowing spiders and disabled users to grasp the context of the image. This provides valuable spider fodder and access to content for the visually impaired.

If this is IT gobbledygook then it simply means when you hover over the image in a browser it will display a description of the image. Don’t be frightened to be descriptive with the images content within the ALT Tag as this will add merit to the SEO as well as being informative to any disabled users. Simply look at the image as if you couldn’t see it and write a short overview.

Mega Pictures!

Most people have Broadband now and bandwidth is generally not an issue but have you ever viewed an image over the Internet and it has taken forever to load. This happens for a multitude of reasons ranging from resizing a very large image within the code, when it still has the file size of the original image, right through to where the novice designer has simply uploaded the original image and it is just ridiculously massive. Put two or three of these images on your front page and you will be on a back foot from the offset.

As an Example

The two images below are almost visually identical but there is a huge difference in file size but as an Internet image does this matter? Going back more years than I care to remember an industry standard loading for a front page when we were on 56kb modems was circa 20kb which loaded the page reasonably quickly.

We now have fibre optics along with assorted other forms of connections so this benchmark has changed. This is great for using assorted forms of high bandwidth media but is it really required for images and this is where a happy medium is required.

700kb

100kb

19kb

But where do you stop reducing the image quality?

Get A Free One!!

http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx