Learn Search Engine Optimization

If you use images on your web pages, it’s good practice to include alt tags for all those images. Alt tags are the alternative text that’s displayed on your site while a graphic is loading or if it doesn’t load at all. They also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people who might be using text readers. And these tags are another place where you might want to include your keywords to help boost keyword frequency and improve search engine rankings. Even if your site is already content rich and that content is tagged for optimization, alt tags allow you to reinforce your most important keywords within the context of the site content.

There is a lot of debate over how valuable alt tags actually are in search engine optimization. They have been drastically abused by some web designers who fill the alt tags with streams of keywords rather than accurate descriptions of the images they are meant to represent. But they are required for standards-based HTML web sites, and can play a small role in helping to improve your search engine rankings. What’s more, alt tags should be used for every image on your site (even if they have no SEO value), because seeing what the image descriptions are helps those users who might have difficulty loading your site.

An example of an alt tag might be the description of a picture of the Mona Lisa on your web site. Your alt tag, then, should look like this:

Alt="Mona Lisa"

The alt tag usually falls at the end of the image tag. An image tag might look something like this:

<img width="100"
height="100"
src="monalisa.jpg"

alt="Mona Lisa">

The image code breaks down like this:

• <img width=”100″: The width (in pixels) of the image.

• Height=”100″: The height (in pixels) of the image.

• Src=”monalisa.jpg”: The source of the image file.

• Alt=”Mona Lisa”>: The alternative text that’s displayed when the image is not.

One more note about alt tags: To be really effective, these tags should be used for every single image on your web site. That could become an arduous task if your site hasn’t been properly coded to start with (and depending on the number of images that you have on your site). However, the addition of these tags should be advantageous to your SEO efforts as long as you don’t overstep the unspoken boundaries of alt tags.

Alt tags in graphic links

To this point, you’ve heard that alternative text for graphics (or graphic links) should always be included in your web pages. Now is where you find out the exceptions to that rule. Alternative text, in the form of alt tags, is very useful in circumstances where visitors to your site are using text-only browsers, when those visitors have graphic capabilities turned off on their browser, or when they use screen readers to “read” your web pages to them. And that’s what makes alt tags so important.

However, if your web site features a lot of repetitive images, it might be redundant for you to use the same alt tag over and over again. What’s more, when you’re using graphics (like pictures and clip art) as links, visitors will quickly tire of seeing alt=”hyperlink”. Unless the graphics used on your page and in your links contain information that is vitally important to your web site, you can usually use one instance of a descriptive alt tag, and then for each repetitive picture, use an empty alt tag: alt=”".

If you’re using alternative tags for graphic links, you can differentiate each one by using the website address that you’re linking to in the alt tag. However, don’t use web addresses that string on for three or four lines. Instead, use a basic web address (www.basicaddress.com). For example, Figure 1shows what graphic links look like without alt text, and what both graphic links and graphics look like with alt text.

Figure 1:Alt text helps visitors who don’t have or don’t allow graphics displays, and also those with screen readers.

You should avoid using overly long alt tags, no matter what type of graphic you’re using them with. A good rule is that your alt tag should be no more than one line long, and if you can create effective, shorter tags, it’s that much better.

If an image on your site is strictly text — for example, a company logo that is stylized text — one way to handle it would be to create stylized text using a style sheet to suggest some particular properties through type face, size, or color. For example, using the CSS rule strongthe code for your text might look like this:

{ background: #ffc none; color: #060; font-weight: normal; font-
family: "Comic Sans MS", Western, fantasy; }

The problem with creating stylized text in place of a text-only graphic is that sometimes it just doesn’t work as well. The company logo that was mentioned earlier might be acceptable in a text-only format, but only if the logo was designed that way to start with. If the logo has any graphic element to it at all, even though it is text, changing the display to a non-graphic style would cause you to lose the brand recognition that comes with the logo.

Another problem that you may run into when creating alt tags is bulleted lists that contain decorative (graphic) bullets. One way to handle alt text for bullet images is to write the tag using an asterisk or a dash to indicate each new bullet point like this:

alt="*"

or

alt="-"

Your other alternative is to use an alt tag that actually describes the graphic used for the bullet point:

Alt="black musical note"

Alt tags, whether you’re using them in graphical links or just in place of graphics, are one way for people who can’t see your images to understand your site. Many times, graphics play a large part in how your site displays. But there are times when the use of alt tags is just redundant, and in those cases, avoiding them is the best option.

Body text is that text visible to readers of your site, but not included in a header. When you look at the pages of any book, for example, the text that’s between headings is the body text. It’s the same for web pages.

Although you’ve already used keywords in several places on your web site, body text is another place where you’ll want to include your keywords when possible. There is no hard-and-fast rule on the number of times that your keywords should appear on a page, but a good rule of thumb is that you use them about once every paragraph or two, on the condition that they make sense in the content of the site.

What many people who are optimizing their sites don’t realize is that all the strategies for SEO can be overdone, including the use of your keywords in the body text of your site. You should use these words regularly in your text, but don’t use them out of context or just as a ploy to improve your search engine standings. If the keywords don’t work in the normal flow of the text on the page, don’t include them. Nonsense will gain you no points at all with search engine crawlers.

Body text should be placed into your web site using the body-text tags: <body>Insert Body Text</body>. These are not the only body-text tags that you’ll use, however. In addition to the tags that indicate where your body text begins and ends, there are also tags that indicate special formatting in text. Those tags are:

<b>Bold</b>
<i>Italics</i>
<strong>Strongly Emphasized</strong>
<em>Emphasis</em>
<li>New Line in List</li>

Each of these tags indicates special formatting for the word or phrase within the opening and closing tags, and the special emphasis makes a search engine crawler take notice of those words. Therefore, if you can use keywords within those tags, you should try to. But the same rule applies to these formatting options for body text: Only use keywords where appropriate and avoid stuffing keywords into your site simply to improve your search engine rankings. If you use those tactics, it’s likely they will fail.

Making your web site’s body text visible (or readable) to search engine crawlers isn’t all that complicated. Even so, many site designers still struggle with the issue, because there are certain text styles that cannot be indexed by search engines. These styles are often used on web sites in an effort to improve the appearance of the site. Some of the text visibility issues that site designers contend with include:

• Text embedded in JavaScript applications or Macromedia Flash files.

• Text contained in image files (including those with these extensions: jpg, gif, png, bmp).

• Text that is accessible only on a submission form or other portion of the page that requires some action or interaction with the user.

If search engine crawlers can’t see your web-site text, they can’t index that content for visitors to find. So having “seeable” content is essential to ranking well and getting properly indexed. In some cases, you must use a graphic, a special type of formatting like JavaScript or Flash, or even forms that contain text. If you must use these unreadable forms of text, try to optimize your site by using keywords in headings, title tags, URLs, and alt tags on the page. Just remember that you shouldn’t go overboard with embedding keywords into headings, or other tags.

Title tags are perhaps the most important SEO tags for any web site, and if you can place your keywords in the beginning of the title tag, that improves the effectiveness of those tags much more. The maximum number of characters allowed by most search engines for title length is 60 to 65 for proper display. However, a few search engines allow fewer or more characters in a title.

Search engine spiders use these title tags as the main source for determining the web-page topic. Spiders or crawlers examine the title, and the words used in it are then translated into the topic of the page. That’s one reason it’s always best to use your keywords in your page title, and to use them as close to the beginning of the title as possible. The text included in the title tag is also the text that will appear in SERPs as the linked title on which users will click to access your page.

For example, if you have an informational web site that provides guidelines for choosing retirement funds, and the most important keywords for your web site are “retirement funding” and “retirement income,” then a page title (which is the text used in the title tag) along the lines of “Retirement Funding Options to Increase Income,” is highly relevant to the topic of the site. Spiders will crawl your site, and because the title tag is the first element encountered, the spider will “read” it and then examine your site, as well as the keywords used in other places on your site (which you learn about shortly), to determine how relevant the title is to the content of the site.

That’s why it’s vitally important to target the most critical keywords in the title tag. You may use 20 keywords on your web page, but two or three of those keywords (or even just a single phase) are the most important keywords you’ve selected. These are the keywords that should be used in your title tag.

Another important factor to remember when using title tags in your web-site design is to create a unique title for every page in the site. Make the title as descriptive as possible, and again, use the most important or effective keywords you’ve selected for the page, because the words you use in your title tag will appear in the reverse title bar, or the tab title, of your web browser, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1:The text within the title tag appears in the reverse title bar or the tab title of your web browser.

Now that you know why you should use a title tag, the question becomes what exactly does a title tag look like, and where do you use it?

The best way to learn where you should place your title tag is to look at the source code for other web sites. As Figure 2 shows, the title tag is located within the head tag, along with the meta description tag and the meta keyword tag.

Figure 2:The title tag is located within the head tag, along with the meta description and meta keyword tags.

This illustration is taken from the actual source code for a real web site. However, it’s difficult to see exactly how the title tag comes between the opening and closing head tags, so here’s a little more simplistic view:

<HEAD>
<TITLE> Home </TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Technology for consumers.">
<META name="keywords" content="identity theft, voip, jerri ledford,
books, technology, cybersecurity, spam, phishing, pharming, trojans,
computer virus, malware, cyberstalking, cyberharrassment, security">
</HEAD>

If you take this code apart line by line, here’s what you have:

• <HEAD>: This is the opening head tag.

• <TITLE> Home </TITLE>: This is the title tag, including both the opening and the closing code.

• <META name=”description” content=”Technology for consumers.”>: This is the meta description tag, where you place a brief description of your site, keywords included.

• <META name=”keywords” content=”identity theft, voip, jerri ledford, books, technology, cybersecurity, spam, phishing, pharming, trojans, computer virus, malware, cyberstalking, cyberharrassment, security”>: This tag is where you’ll list the keywords that you’re using to describe your site. These could be either organic or purchased keywords.

• </HEAD>: This is the closing head tag. It indicates that the information in the header of the page has ended.

It’s important that the title tag appear somewhere within the opening and closing head tags. If the title tag is located in other places in your web-site encoding, it won’t render properly, and you’ll be left with a web site that doesn’t behave the way that you expect it to.

When creating your title tags, remember that the best title tags are those that contain targeted keywords, help develop the brand for the site, and are both concise and attention-grabbing. Usually, the text included between the opening and closing title tags also translates into the linked text that is displayed in search engine rankings. In other words, the title tag provides the first (and sometimes only) impression of your web page. It can either draw in visitors or cause searchers to choose a different search result altogether.

Meta description tags are also important for every page on your web site. In some search engine results, the text beneath the linked title (shown in Figure 1) comes directly from the information included in the meta description tag.

Figure 1:In some search engine results, the text displayed below the title comes from the meta description tag.

Despite the fact that not all search engines use the description included in the meta description tags, all of them do read the description tag. They also use the description included there as one of the factors considered during the ranking process.

The catch with meta description tags is that they work differently for different search engines. For example, Google gives very little weight to meta descriptions. Instead, the Google search engine looks at the text on a page. And on the SERPs, Google doesn’t display the meta description text either. What does show is the content surrounding the instance of the keyword on your site. Google calls this a snippet.

The Yahoo! search engine, however, does put weight on meta description text, and it uses that text directly under the web site link on SERPs.

So, what does this all mean? First, it means that your meta description tag isn’t the most important piece of coding your web page. However, it also means that you don’t want to skip over the meta description tag, because some search engines actually do use it.

So you should include the meta description tag on each page of your web site using the following guidelines:

• Different search engines allow different description text lengths. A good rule of thumb is to keep your descriptions to around 200–250 characters. That’s about enough space for one to two descriptive sentences.

• Every page in your web site should include its own, unique meta description tag.

• Meta description tags should include keywords with high levels of importance or effectiveness.

• Meta description text should not be the same as the text included in the title tag.

Like the title tag, the meta description tag belongs inside the <Head> </Head>section of your web pages. Ordinarily, web-site designers include the meta description tag after the title tag and before the meta keywords tag, but that’s not set in stone. As long as the meta description tag appears between the opening and closing head tags, it will be read by crawlers as it should be.

When creating your meta description tag, this is what it should look like:

<META name="description" content="Your description goes here.">

For example, the meta description tag that I might use for my personal web site would look like this:

<META name="description" content="Technology for consumers.">

It’s important to note that not everyone agrees on the value of the meta description tag. However, it takes very little time to include this tag (or any of the tags included in this section of the book) in your web-site coding; therefore, including it should be a given. As with many different strategies in SEO, these tags are not a sure thing, and they are not the absolute solution to ensuring that your site ranks well. But they are one more element that could affect your ranking, so including them should be automatic.

Figure 1:Anchor text is the linked text on a web page and plays a large part in determining your search engine ranking.

Chances are, you see anchor text every day. In fact, anchor text has become such a major inclusion on web pages that companies often use it without any thought as to how it could affect their search engine rankings.

How you use anchor text does matter, however, because anchor text is one of the most important search engine ranking factors. When a search engine looks at your web page, it automatically follows all the links that you have on the page. If those links (or even a large portion of those links) are text-based links, that’s even better, because then what the search engine sees is not just the link to another page, but also your keywords. It’s not enough just to make all your links text-based, however. There’s a fine science to taking advantage of the power of anchor text.

The first thing you should understand is that there are two kinds of anchor texts: yours and everyone else’s. I’m not being facetious here. It really is important that you consider not only how you link with other people, but also how they will link back to you. For example, if you do a Google search for the term “click,” you’ll find that the Apple QuickTime web site is at the very top of the list. This isn’t because Apple loaded down the QuickTime site with the keyword “click.” What’s actually happened is that many people link to QuickTime using the word “click” in their anchor text. This isn’t hard to believe, because most web sites that use the QuickTime application usually include a text link to “Click here to download” or something similar. As you can see, it’s not just your own anchor text that matters. How your site is included in others’ anchor text is also important.

We’ll come back to how other people link to you. For now, let’s consider how you use anchor text in your web site. As we’ve already established, anchor text is the linked text on your web site. This text can be linked either to other pages within your own web site, or it can be linked to others’ web sites that are relevant to the content of your site. And that’s the real key to how anchor text can be so powerful — the relevance of the link and the words used to create the link.

When a search engine crawls your site, it’s looking at several different factors — the topic of the site as indicated by the words used in the text, the links leading away from the site, and the links leading into the site. Of course, these aren’t the only factors that matter, but they’re among the top-ranking factors, because how these elements are handled determines how user-friendly (and authentic) your site is. So if your site caters to gourmet cooks, the information on your site might include articles about gourmet techniques, gourmet recipes, and links to web sites where site visitors can purchase gourmet ingredients or tools.

When the crawler examines your site, it’s going to see that the topic of the site is gourmet cooking (which will be determined by the keywords you use in the site text). Then it’s going to follow all the links on your site. If those links happen to be text-based links that use your keywords, and they lead to web sites that are relevant to the topic of your site, you’re going to score well with the search engine crawler. The result is that you’ll appear higher in SERPs than you would if you didn’t have relevant keywords in your text and links.

You should use care when creating anchor text links, however. If you use the wrong words, you won’t get nearly the mileage that you need from the links. One mistake some web-site owners make is to create web pages with the anchor text “click here.” That phrase is in no way related to the content of the site, so when a crawler examines the anchor text, it doesn’t see relevant keywords, even if the links are relevant to web sites that are relevant to the content of the site. Think of your anchor text as a chance to showcase the relationships you have with related companies.

What works best is to use as many of the keywords as you can from the list of relevant keywords that you developed during the planning process. Going back to our gourmet cooking example, if you use an anchor text link that reads Gourmet Ingredients and links to a web site that sells gourmet foods, a search engines sees your key phrase (Gourmet Ingredients) and it sees a link that leads to a web site that sells gourmet ingredients. So for the effort of creating that small piece of anchor text, you not only have a valid reason to use your keywords and phrases, but you also have a link that leads to a relevant web site.

So if you’re adding the anchor text for Gourmet Ingredients to your web page, you must add a piece of HTML like this in each spot where you want the anchor text to appear:

<a href="http://www.gourmetingredientslink.com">GourmetIngredients</a>

Then, on your web site, what the user sees is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 3:Anchor text may also be called text links.

One more strategy for anchor text that you should consider is varying the anchor text. When you repeat the same anchor text over and over again on a given web page, it begins to lose its effectiveness, and in fact can cause a search engine crawler to rank your site lower in the SERPs. It’s much more effective to use multiple keywords and phrases as anchor text on a web page. This allows you to vary the anchor text, but to maintain a consistency in the keywords and phrases you use.

The other type of anchor text is that which others use to link back to your site. Many times, this anchor text is overlooked as an SEO strategy; however, it’s one of the most effective types of optimization that you can use. Here’s an example: One savvy marketer on the Internet decided to see how quickly he could make his site rank high in the Google SERPs. So he used anchor text links on his page, and then solicited reciprocal links, based on highly targeted keywords and phrases that were relevant to his site. The result was that within four days, the web site had shot to the number four position in the Google SERPs.

There are two elements to consider in this story. The first is that the web-site owner sought reciprocal links. These are links to your page from another web site, in return for your site linking to them. The reciprocal links are most effective when they come from sites that are relevant to your web site. But most often, you’ll have to seek the links out. Furthermore, in order to take advantage of all the value of reciprocal links, you also need to ensure that your site is linked to in a certain way. Instead of having another site just link to your main page, it’s most effective to provide a potential linking site with the code that includes the anchor text you want to use.

The second element of the story, to which you should pay special attention, is that the links used by the webmaster were highly targeted keywords. In order to learn which keywords will be most effective for your site, you should refer to your keyword research. The keywords that are searched for most often, but are as narrowly related to your site as possible, are the keywords that you should consider using in your anchor text. The whole point of anchor text is to optimize your site to gain higher search engine rankings, which in turn brings visitors to your site.

So how often should you use anchor text on a web page? That’s one of those magic numbers that no one really knows for sure. Different people will tell you different things. Some say no more than two or three times, others say no less than 10 or 12 times. A good rule of thumb is to use anchor text as many times as there is a solid reason to use it. Don’t load your content with anchor text just to have the links, but if you have a relevant link that can be included, don’t skip it just because you’ve used anchor text five other times on the page.

Determining what anchor text is essential and what isn’t is a personal decision. However, if you’re using a good analytics program that tracks the links on your web pages, you should be able to determine which anchor text links are most effective and how using them on a page affects your normal traffic flow. Anchor text is a good way to improve your search engine ranking, but as you’ve seen many times before in this book, your web pages should be designed with the user in mind.

One more note about anchor text before moving on. One of the most effective ways to use anchor text is in dynamic content. Dynamic content is content that changes regularly. Most often, that means blogs. Anchor text is well suited to blogs that change daily or weekly. This is fresh content (which is also a plus for improving your search engine rankings). It gives you an opportunity to change your anchor text regularly. Search engine crawlers get bored, too, and if you can provide them with dynamic content that contains relevant anchor text, those crawlers will look on you with favor.