Today many people believe that search engine optimization is a waste of time. I think it is based on misunderstanding of what SEO really is. This misunderstanding is often a result of negative users experience as far as relevancy of the search results are concerned. If you practice SEO in an attempt to manipulate search result to get to the top at any cost, you are very short sighted.
I belong to a group of people who believe that SEO can be very useful. I am mindful of SEO every time I write a new post, trying to provide useful and relevant content to the user. I don’t think I am cheating my way to the top of the search engine results. Every time I write an article, I want it to come up in top 10 results for a keyword or set of keywords.
Why 10 top results? Most of the internet users using search engines do not change the default settings and, after submitting a query, each page produces 10 search results. The top 10 search results across the search engines receive anywhere from 70% to 95% or more of all clicks.
I have recently discovered 103bees (HT: ProBlogger). 103bees is a very good analytics tool, which every blogger should use. It helped me to visualize the distribution of click over the keywords used to find this blog. One need thing about 103bees, that it also reports what position of the search results your website was found at. Take a look at the results for this blog of last few days:
As you can see, the likelihood of user ending up visiting your website if it found among top 10 results is 7+ times more than if your website was found on the second page (results 11-20).
When creating new content for your blog or website, you should be mindful of good SEO practices. It can produce impressive results.
Picture speaks lauder than words. This of course is true as far as human beings are concerned. But it is not so with those little spiders that often crawl your website or blog. In fact they can use a little help to understand and make sense of the images posted on your blog.
To have them understand better your images, you can effectively use two attributes alt and title inside the img tag on your pages and your blog posts. If you are not familiar what do they stand for here is a short overview:
ALT attribute is text value that is displayed instead of the image itself, should your visitor have disabled to load images when visiting your website. Some times you can notice this text value loads slightly faster than the image itself.
TITLE attribute, which should not be confused with TITLE tag found in the header of the page, can be used to enhance just about any element of your page. When it used inside the img tag or a link, it provides an elegant effect when a user hovers with their mouse over the image or link. Try to hover with the cursor pointer (mouse) over the image below:
Both title and alt attributes are considered as part of your page’s content by the search engines.
Nothing will demonstrate the proper better way of using alt and title attributes than actual examples.
Here is the first scenario. Many of the HTML editors and even Blogging platforms create an empty alt attribute. The image below is example of default setting of HTML editors or blogging platforms for adding pictures to your web page:
As you can see the alt attribute contains the name of the file and the title attribute does not exist at all. If you use images on your blog or website chances are that each file is named after the date and time when the picture was taken. This of course provides very little information as far as search engine bot is concerned.
Here is another example of the same picture but with enhanced alt and title attributes. Hover the mouse over the image to see the differnece:
And here is the source code for the above image:
<img src=’http://www.go-beyond-mls.com/images/9-30-2006.jpg’ alt=’Photo of The White House’ title=’The White House- Home of The President of The United States’ />
The above image speaks not only to a human being but also to the search engine bots communicating important information about your image or picture through alt ad title attributes. The value of both attributes is considered to be part of the content of the page.
In real estate using these attributes can prove to be very effective from the SEO point of view. Especially when Google is concerned. Google uses the value of the attributes when the image search is performed.
Next time you write about a new listing or place a picture of a home on your blog, make sure to use effectively the alt and title attributes. If your blog uses WYSIWYG editor, it would be better to turn it off so you can modify the scour code of your images. This may take some time to get use to. But when you conquer it, I am most certain that no future image on your blog will appear without these attributes.
To rank well in the search engines, you must create unique content. No one other than the real estate agents are in position to provide truly unique content. {sarcasm}Unless of course a house is listed by two different brokers{/sarcasm}
Update: At the advise of fellow blogger and SEO expert, I am updating this post with a video by Google’s Matt Cutts talking about importance of enhancing your images with alt tag:
April 17, 2008
Posted in Analytics, Blogging, SEO, Web Master Tips 
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