SEO Moves Blog - Search Engine Optimisation » Optimization Techniques

Choosing a Domain

John — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:45:13 +0000

The best domain name is one that is short, memorable, relevant, and easy to spell. Unfortunately, almost all those are already taken, at least if you want .com for your top level domain. If you find such a name, buy it immediately. Sometimes if you hesitate, you’ll tip off a domain watcher lurking to see what domains people are interested in. These people will grab up a site for $30 or so, and if you come back and decide you want it after all, suddenly it’s taken, and somehow “worth” several hundred dollars.

A long domain name that makes sense is better than a short domain name that doesn’t. Non-hyphenated domain names are better than hyphenated ones in most cases. If you can’t get the .com top-level domain, then .net is becoming a reasonable alternative. The .org extension is a good one, but some people think of sites with this extension as being nonprofits, even though they don’t have to be.

If possible, get a good domain name before starting your site and building your brand. It’s not that easy to go back and shoehorn your site name to fit your domain, or to shoehorn your domain into your sitename. It can be done, but the results are often less than satisfactory.

How to Optimize an Image or Photo

John — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:09:55 +0000

According to some SEO pundits, optimizing images for search engines is woefully underused, and according to others it doesn’t make much difference. But the end result is that optimizing images for search engines certainly isn’t going to hurt, so here are some tips how to do it.

Use original images that you can brand with your logo or url.
Use high quality images and make adjustments to resolution between the full sized images and thumbnails.
Save photos as JPGs and other images as GIFs. Search engines interpret GIFs as standard graphic images (256 colors), and they’re going to interpret JPGs as photos.
Make the file names representative of what’s in the picture, i.e., “small-mouth-bass.jpg” as opposed to “DSC1452.jpg.”
Optimize the page the image is on. Search engines examine the text surrounding a graphic to determine relevancy. Use labels, captions, and relevant text all around your image.
But don’t “keyword stuff.” Users and search engines see right through that.
Don’t put a “click to see larger image” in a JavaScript link. The search engines can’t “see” it that way.
If you’re targeting very popular keywords, try re-uploading your pictures. Image freshness sometimes clues the search engines in as to relevancy. It’s worth a shot anyway.

H1 Tags

John — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:30:04 +0000

Prominent text on a web page, such as a heading, is often used by search engines to determine where to rank that page. They are given their own tag to the main body of page text. One helpful tip for improving your chances for moving up in the search engine rankings is to improve your H1 tags. The H1 tag is still important to search engines today, even though it has been around for a long time and many changes have evolved over the years as to how search engines work.

The H1 tag is to the search engines, like a headline is when you look at a newspaper. We trust that it’s relevant to the content in the article, and so we’re drawn in if the headline is about something we’re interested in. If the content isn’t good, and if it doesn’t have a good headline telling the search engines why it’s there, then the search engines will not rank it highly.

Therefore, if you are trying to optimize a given web page for one keyword phrase, it should appear in the H1 header. You can see an example of the html in the screen shot from the site http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/_H35n.html. The H1 tag (and the other H tags as well) tells the search engine that those are important, relevant words for that page. In other words, it is what the search robots “see” as a headline so that they will “know” what a given page is about, which can only improve your search engine ranking.