Do you have homepage images linking to important pages within your site?

Google has made progress when it comes to reading text embedded within images,but it is still a fair way from mastering the art.

So, don’t play the lottery when it comes to displaying text on images – display the basic image as a background, and replace the embedded text by floating html text over the top.

This will give Google very clear signals about the ‘nature’ of the image and will allow you to use anchor text targeting your keywords when displaying the link, increasing the fundamental value of the link.

This can make a big difference!

Did I mention that link buying is against Google’s TOS and if found to be indulging in this type of naughtiness you will be flogged with a pair of James’s underpants? Good…

So, I was approached this week by another well-known UK SEO company (who will rename nameless at this point – unless they ignore my request to be taken off their ‘database’) asking if we would like to buy links on behalf of our clients.

Now, as I explained, we do all of our link buidling in-house, but I let the salesman continue because I was interested in their ‘techniques’.

Basically, this is what they do:

1. They contact website owners and basically buy (with the promise of ‘free’ SEO services) a hidden page from them where they place upto 25 links.

2. They then sell those 25 links either directly to ‘private’ link buyers or to SEO companies like our good selves at a wholesale rate.

Now, you may think that a link is a link is a link (repeat ad infinitum), but here is why these links should be avoided like the rat-flu:

1. The pages these links are placed on have no inbound links themselves (they are usually literally ‘hidden’) and so pass no link equity (or ‘link juice)

2. I have done a teeny weeny bit of research and can tell you that despite their promises, these link pages are not closely themed to the links at all

3. Even ‘Baldrick the turnip’ can determine that these are paid links, with many of these pages al having links to the same websites (i.e identifying the link buyers)

So, if you fancy your site being penalised by the Big G, then sell your soul to the SEO-devil, but don’t say I didn’t warn you!

I recently conducted an SEO audit on an ecommerce website that was using underscores (the _ symbol) in its URL’s as a word separator.

If you are doing this, you should replace those underscores with hyphens (the – symbol) as Google is able to separate hyphenated words far more easily, and apportion SEO score accordingly.

So, as an example, rather than:

yoursite.com/categories/monkey_food

You should use:

yoursite.com/categories/monkey-food

Further Reading: Dashes Vs Underscores

It’s official… the load speed of a web page is used by Google as a factor to determine ranking (albeit small):

www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/

So, with this in mind, why not have a race with your competitors? Just add upto 10 competing URL’s into this tool, and make sure you win the gold medal (or at least get onto the podium).

www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

It all helps!

We are often asked about the importance and role of the meta keyword tag. Here is a little information:

• The meta keywords tag is not considered by Google at all
• The meta keywords tag is not considered by Bing at all
• The meta keywords tag is barely considered by Yahoo, and for categorisation purposes only
• Yahoo will be using the Bing search technology later this year so even the very marginal benefit offered by Yahoo is soon to be removed

So, best practice says add upto 10 comma-separated keyphrases in the meta keywords tag, but if you don’t it will make very little difference to your rankings.

We all know that the addition of a regularly-updated blog to a main site can vastly improve search engine rankings and with Google’s beady eyes set firmly on social content, everybody should have one!

There does, however, still seem to be some confusion about where to install a blog in relation to an existing main site.

Our advice is to add your blog as a subdirectory, e.g:

yoursite.com/blog

The reason for this is that the value of all links coming into your blog posts will benefit your main site without losing link value.

The alternative is adding your blog as a subdirectory, e.g:

blog.yoursite.com

This used to provide full link value to you main site as it was effectively classed as a separate domain, but in 2008, Google changed the way it handled subdomains which resulted in many links from subdomains not passing on full link value.

I hope this helps!

Do you have umpteen links to a single web page from any one single domain?

If so, read this very carefully:

Google places almost complete value on the first link from a single domain to your web page, but every consequent link from that domain to your web page is devauled massivley (if not completely).

So, remember to diversify your link sources accordingly rather than placing all of your links ‘in one basket’.