I answered a question the other day from someone who was wondering why they were not getting any traffic from Google. When I looked at their first page I could see right away what the problem was. The entire page was one big picture. It was chopped up into smaller slices to help it load faster, but there was no text at all.

When I mentioned this they said that there were plenty of words on the page and in a way there were. What they had were pictures of words on the page and not actual text. Unfortunately they didn’t know the difference.

These are words. You type them one letter at a time into the page. You can select all of them with your cursor or just part, then copy and paste them into a text editor like notepad.

This is a picture of words. You do type the letters in when you are creating the images in GIMP or PhotoShop, but once you save it as a picture the letters and words are no longer available to you (or anyone) to select as words any more.

It’s important to know the difference because when the search engines visit your page and they see this picture, they see something like this
<img src=”http://www.lillicotch.com/images/words.jpg” width=”240″ height=”170″/>
You are permitted to put an “alt tag” in this where you can write a description of the picture (and are encouraged to do so), but because it’s not visible to all it’s not trusted the same as if it were actual text that everyone can see.

There are times when you want to do this. Clearly the letters can be much more fancy this way and you are limited quite a bit with plain text as to what will work on a web page, so it may be OK for some places on your page.

Search engines are also getting better at “reading pictures”, but there is still not a good reason to put the main text of your page in a format that is still hard or impossible for search engines to read.

SEO For Images On Your Site

I noticed a discussion on LinkedIn today about whether you blogs URL should look like this www.myblog.blogspot.com or like this www.mydomain.com/blog.

Some people couldn’t understand the difference and others didn’t think that it mattered. Well, there is a difference and it does matter.

The Difference…
When you are looking to see who owns a website the only part of the domain name that tells you who the site belongs to is the part that comes right before the .com (.org, .net, etc.).
That means that if your URL looks like…
MyDomainName.Blogspot.com
or
Blogspot.com/MyDomainName
that page is on the Blogspot website.

If your URL looks like this…
Blogspot.MyDomainName.com
or
MyDomainName.com/Blogspot
that content is on your site and you have complete control over it (or you should)

Why It Matters…
The old saying with SEO used to be “Content Is King” and while that may not be as true as it used to be, new content on your site is still very important for a couple of reasons and it’s true for human visitors as well as the search engines.

First, you need to have words on your site that the search engines can find, read and then know what your site is all about. The more words that you have on your site the more chance that someone will find you. Sometimes for things that you would not have even considered. I’ve mentioned before that if you are lucky enough to get good relevant comments on your posts, that’s even more content for your site that you don’t even have to write.

Next, one of the many factors that search engines use when rating your site is how often that you add new content. They do this because they think (like your human visitors) “all right I’ve seen their site, why would I go back again?”
You would probably only go back more than once or twice if there was something new to look at each time that you did. So, the more times that you add new content the better that you should rank.

You have worked very hard to

• Write new content on a regular basis
• Passed along your knowledge and insights
• Have others add even more in the way of comments

Why would you put this on someone else’s site and let them have all the benefits without any of the work?

There are also a few reasons why you shouldn’t have a blog on your site

Read Should My Business Have A Blog?

When I first started this business I had some business cards made.
I didn’t give it much thought and threw them together pretty quickly.

I’ve been talking about new cards for quite a while now and one of the members of Business Leads Exchange Networking Group that I attend is a graphic designer and illustrator named Dan Szwedko. I know Dan pretty well from the meetings and I like his work. What I thought I’d do is to get a fresh perspective on my card design.

One of Dan’s promotion ideas is that if you’re only printing on one side of your business card you’re also wasting valuable advertising space that you already own. He has a special on two sided business cards.

I gave Dan my logo, my company colors and the text that I wanted on my card. Those of you who read this blog know that I like black text on a white background. It’s always the easiest to read.

I let Dan know this as well and being an artist Dan wanted to add some color to my card. I told him to use my colors any way that he wanted.

He sent me this back…

I must admit that I think the color definitely gives it some style and looking at it I realized that if we flipped the gradient background and put the tan on the top, all of my contact info will still be black on white.
Same with the back.

I really like the ghosted logo Dan added on the back so I kept that and added a bit more text.
I am very happy with the final product.

If you would like to take advantage of my freind Dan’s special of 1000 two sided cards for $47.95, plus a flat fee of Only $25.00 for layout. Just visit his site dsgraphics.net. It’s quality work at a great price and he will even include Free Shipping!

When designing a new site I usually don’t write the content. My feeling is that no one knows your business like you do, but I will offer some help if needed.

One of my new customers had this question, “When I re-write my first page, would it help to include any information so the search engines will find it?” I replied with some basic information that, I hope, was to their point.

Absolutely! You want to place your the keywords or search terms that you want to be found for on your page. Every page should be writen with this in mind, although your human visitor should be your first priority.

Keywords can and should be groups of words. Action words, not just “widgets”, but “buy widgets” or “buy widgets in Pittsburgh PA”. Without the quotes, of course. Using multiple words like this will get you better rankings for those terms than just using single, more generic terms that are much harder to rank well for. It will also get you more qualified visitors that are more likely to want to buy what you have to sell.

You also want the most important keywords in the headlines. You want a main headline for the page and a smaller headline for each paragraph or section that you write. Have your keyword once in the headline and once or twice (no more) in the body text.

Use these keyword suggestion tools to search for popular search terms. No sense optimizing your pages for something no one is searching for. You also want to pick terms that are relevant to your business. Why have visitors come to your site that are not interested in what you have to offer?

There is much more to know about this, but I think it’s a pretty good start.

It seems that every day you are hearing about new browsers showing up to make your web surfing experience a little (or a lot) easier amd more fun.

I thought I would post some good reviews that I have read on each of them.

Today I read a very nice and thorough review of the new IE8 which is still in Beta that is on the SEOBook site.

Read – IE8 Beta Review: A Game Changer, Or More Of The Same?

There has been quite a bit written and talked about lately about an “SEO Bubble” and how long that search engine optimization will remain viable. One of the best posts that I’ve read recently is on a blog called Conversation Marketing.

The issues that seem to be of the most concern is that SEO is pretty simple and that site owners will be doing it themselves, much more than will it go away. I don’t believe that SEO will go away, because if it’s done well it is one the best and most economical ways to bring customers to your site. Even with all of the phoney, fly by night “SEO Experts” out there, most people will learn the difference between good work and bad.

The main concern that has really benn there for quite a while now is that it will move “in house” and individual shops will not have any customers. My feeling here is that while SEO is simple, if done well it’s also quite a bit of hard work. Even is all of the site owners out there know everything about it (still a huge IF) there will be plenty that just would rather pay someone else to do the work well.

Read How the SEO Bubble Will Pop

Not long ago I read that Google and others would soon be able to read the text content in Flash web pages. I thought at the time that many of the things that I have been saying about SEO and Flash are no longer true, but the more that I read about this the more I’m not sure.

I think that I still will advise it’s probably not a good idea to have your navigation in flash and if all the pages of your site is in one big flash file there’s no way possible to send visitors to an individual page. That means they go to the main page and then have to search for what they are looking for. Which means that many will go away before they find it.

If you want to read more there is a very nice post on Site Pro News by Ross Dunn that really explains it well.

Read – Flash is Still Too Flashy for Competitive SEO

One of the things that I mention to my clients that want to start a blog and allow others to add content to their site is that besides blog spam you probably will get some commenters that don’t like you or what you say. I usually say that instead of just deleting the negative comments the best policy is to let the comments stay and just honestly answer their criticism.

By allowing their comments and then answering them you look like you are not afraid of talking about all aspects of your business. Just about everyone knows that no matter how good you are you can’t please everyone. So a blog that doesn’t allow any negative comments will apprear strict and censored. Open conversation not only makes you look better and fair there’s a good chance that if you keep an open mind you can learn from complaints. I have always believed that listening to a couple of honest complaints can help you improve your business much more than a thousand praises.

Of course on your own site you do have the option of just deleting negative comments, but what can you do if they are not on your site? I recently read a great post on the aimClear Search Marketing Blog by Marty Weintraub that really offers some great ideas about what you can to to help you recover and even benefit from damaging negative comments about you or your business posted on the web.

Read Reputation Crises Management: 8 SEO Triage Tips

Yesterday I got an email from a pool company in Virginia. They wanted to exchange links with me.

“Please consider adding our link to your site on your page: http://lillicotch.com/Blog/2008/02/28/add-additional-income-to-your-site/”

For those of you who don’t have blogs, when you allow visitors to post on your site you will get blog spam. Some of the posts will attract more than others and this page is one of my worst for spammers. So what I’m guessing here is that this pool company hired an “SEO company” to help them with search engine rankings and that company probably first tried to post an ad as acomment on this page and then when my spam filter stopped it they tried this email.

Have a look at my page that they wanted a link from. There was nothing about swimming pools on it, in fact, I can’t think of any page on my site that has anything to say about swimming pools except this one.

I also went to visit the pool site and it looked fine. All about swimming pools. Then at the very bottom of the page there was a link to “Resources”. This was a link to page after page of completely unrelated links (a link farm). While this may have been an effective and acceptable form of promotion in 1996 it won’t help you at all today and may actually hurt your rankings. At the very least it looks your site look cheap and spammy.

Of course they probably never actually visited my site, but how much more simple would it have been for them to find any post of mine that they had some interest in and to write a short relevant comment? If the comment was related to my post I would have allowed it along with a link to their site and I probably wouldn’t have noticed or cared that it was a swimming pool site. Not only that one way links tend to be much more valued than link exchanges anyway.

If you want to know the right way to get traffic to your site there’s a good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the USA Today’s site. Anyone want to trade links?

Read Good directions drive traffic to your website

One of the things that I tell my customers when we first start to design their site is to try to think of keywords that they should use in their content to help search engines find them. To put these keyword(s) in the headlines and once or twice in the main text.

I have written before about keyword suggestion tools that help you determine popular keywords that people search for, but what I never really had was a process for deciding which words that my customers should be using. I usually have them tell me what keywords that they want to be found for and many times they weren’t the best ones for people to find them for or were not very popular search terms at all. I’ve said many times before what good are millions of visitors if they just come and then leave right away? You want keywords that bring traffic, but visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.

Recently I read a post on the SEOmoz blog that described a step by step process for helping discover what keywords would work best for a customer’s site. This is some great advice and it always helps to have a standardized process for determining what needs done. I highly recommend reading…

Building Bricks: Keyword Discovery Process for Small Businesses