Teh Chad

Over the past year, I have worked towards understanding some web design and some SEO. Nearly every time I try to solve a problem, it goes back to the simple foundations.

So many people optimize their “content” and by that I mean their text. SEO includes more than that. There are a few things that SEO cannot optimize: javascript and flash. This is because Google does not index things on any website, much less any business website, like CSS and javascript.

Photos, however, CAN be optimized. Try a search that you are thinking about at the moment. Now, click over to images in the top left (if you’re on Google). A new screen is shown. Chances are that the images that you are looking at are from different websites than you were just looking at a moment ago on the “web” search.

So how do we optimize images for better SEO rank? Just like a regular page, but they’re called different things.
The three areas we should look at are:
> the file name
> the title
> the alt tag

But Chad! Doesn’t it have to be an “SEO image” since that’s what you write about? Doesn’t Google KNOW???!?!?! Well, I have a saying when someone asks me a q that I don’t know “Well, I don’t know, but Google does!” In the case of optimizing images, Google does not know. There are a couple of “picture” search engines, but they have yet to catch on. The point is that Google can’t really tell what the image is. It CAN, however, see the things mentioned above – file name, title, alt – the things you mention when you call the image in html.

For an example, I’ll put up my business logo – SEO optimized of course!

Google has this great tendency to experiment. They change things and then let us know a few days afterward. It appears that they are looking to compete with even more of the little guys and their ideas now.

Google has joined the ranks of Bit.ly, digg, and many others with their URL shortener. Aptly, their page is at http://goo.gl.

The short URL has really changed how we do SEO in the area of linkbuilding. Linkbuilding is simply getting links to your site on other sites. This can be done in many ways, blog comments being very common.

With the advent of Twitter (i.e. “a little bird told me”), mini blogs exploded. Facebook definitely contributed too. And social media was born! We found ALL of our friends! Then we shared cool links with our friends and business acquaintances. Why not share our new stories too?

Sharing our stories, posted on other sites of course, with business associates is really where social networking for SEO was born. Now we can share posts like this one with everyone we know in seconds. But who is really going to shove “http://tehchad.com/seo-google-entered-short-url-market/” into a tweet? When you’re limited to 140 characters, a URL like that is just too long. Ergo, we use things like bit.ly and goo.gl.

People talk about Google and business all of the time. Some people take a step further and talk about SEO or search engine optimization. Still others take a shot at doing for a given website.

There are bunches of people who work in the SEO realm, most call themselves freelancers. Again, many people attempt it, few people DO it.

There are many ways to optimize a site, but when you knock SEO down to business there are really three places that need attention. You key words should go in these three places:
> The title bar
> The header tags / blog title
> In the blog content.

The first two are normally taken care of during the design phase of building your site. Once in a while, some versatility will be needed when going after new key words. In this case, the header tags may be set around each individual blog post title. The SEO writer will then have to focus on keeping key words in blog titles as well.

Blog content is the bulk of a business writer’s time and work. Writing optimized content is something of an adjustment for most people as it does not read well. We have been programmed into write things that “flow” and “hold the reader.”

As you can imagine, natural writers can adjust and produce lots of great business content. The rest of us have to work at it!

It should be noted that this is the main focus of SEO; there are MANY other things that you can do to gain strength on Google’s pages.