Why SEO words also means pictures
The importance of labelling your images correctly for SEO purposes We publish articles on blogs to build authority and find search engine delight. We spend lots of time researching to come up with fresh content and we try to make the most out of every piece we publish. But being a writer nowadays doesn’t refer to just writing a piece and hitting the publish button. If you want your post to be found, you need to optimise it before it goes on the web. And when I say optimisation I don’t mean just content. I mean titles, URLs, tags and, yes (!), images. You have no idea how many images there are on the web labeled as IMG. It’s such a shame, especially since most blogging platforms make it so easy to label photos. There are millions of beautiful photos out there that no one’s going to see just because they weren’t labeled properly. Who do you think is searching for doimg14576.jgp on Google images? No one, you can be sure of that. Google can’t see your images but it can most definitely read their descriptions. If you have no description, it’s like your image doesn’t exist. Think about it. Images take valuable space on your site, in your posts, and you’re wasting it, when you should be taking advantage. It’s so easy to optimise images that you just have no reason not to do it. Set a unique title, an ALT text and a description with relevant keywords for every image you include in your article so that search engines know what they’re “looking” at. This will help you get some extra traffic when people are searching for images using certain keywords. We are extremely visual. When a user is searching for restaurants, hotels or any service or product for that matter, he’s interested in a written review, but he’s even more interested in seeing pictures because seeing is believing. Don’t lose a great opportunity to get some more traffic on your site when it’s so easy to optimise your images. Make this a priority, not an afterthought. Do you optimise your images? Let us know via your comment below.
Google’s moderating revealed
While Google remains one of the most sophisticated ‘automated’ search engines around it still has a crack commando team of human experts checking content is suitable and meets its guidelines and dealing with those sites that don’t. This YouTube video presented by Matt Cutts, a Search engineer at Google explains more about its search rank penalties. The first in the process is the web spam team acting manually on flagged issue such as an adverse spam report or the discovery of off-topic porn within a site. Such issues are dealt with a “time-out” punishment, excluding that site from search results. These seem to be fairly arbitrary with Cutts suggesting those found guilty of using hidden text perhaps likely to get handed a time-out that expires after 30 days. Yet even the more serious offenders also get given a second chance. Found guilty of using cloaking and / or perhaps something more malicious and the time-out punishment will be longer but even that will expire at some point in time. Yet every flag and manual intervention also improves the automated side of Google’s search. Learning all the time, the Google techies then try and use that information to update and improve their algorithims, to hopefully minimise the need for manual intervention in the future. For those hit with a time-out the ‘suspension’ can also be brought to an end quicker. Clean the offending bits up, submit a re-consideration request and Google could lift the ban earlier. The three minute video is an interesting insight into how Google is using human intervention to improve its already leading automated technology. Have you been the subject of a Google time-out? Were you able to lift it easily? The