Mitch Bartlett

Tech and Life

SEO

Image Content and SEO

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We all know that detailed ALT tags in your images can help SEO on your web pages, but what about the actual image? For example, let’s say that I wrote a page about “Sioux Falls”. ALT tags and image names aside, would an image of Falls Park help my SEO? I believe it would.

Google developed this type of technology to decipher what is actually in an image with their Google Goggles app. It’s also technology they will be using with their Google Glasses product. It only makes sense that Google would use this technology to also rank search results. A post that has an image of what is being written about is much better than one that contains an image that’s not related.

That being said, I think images can hurt your rankings as well. Most notably, images stolen from other websites. If you copy an image from another website, Google is able to tell. That signal may just force your pages down in the rankings.

If it actual image content isn’t a ranking signal yet, it’s definitely something that will be used in the future.

To Date or Not To Date Your Posts

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Years ago, I removed all timestamps from my posts. This was because people are biased when it comes to reading a post that is old. Google indexes date information on your page too, which can cause people not to even click through to your site.

Though I couldn’t tell how much of an impact this made, there was something not right about not including a timestamp on my posts. Since readers may want that kind of information, it becomes a question about designing my pages better for the reader. So I recently reintroduced timestamps on my posts. This time though, I decided not to provide the date the post was published. Instead, I use the date the post was modified. It’s way more relevant to a reader to provide the last date your post was updated rather than the first day it was posted.

In WordPress, you can hack your theme to provide the date your post was modified by inserting this code:

Last modified: <?php the_modified_time(‘ F j, Y’); ?>

Personally, I like providing this information at the end of posts. That way, it’s indexed by Google, but it’s not right at the top of the page.

Check What Other Websites Are Hosted On Your Shared Server

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I just watched a video where Matt Cutts of Google talks about shared web hosting and whether or not you should be concerned if your web site is hosted on the same server as spammy websites.

He says it’s only an issue if there are thousands of questionable sites hosted on the same IP address as your site. It’s highly unlikely that would happen, but I became curious about the other sites hosted on my shared server. Here’s how you can check.

1. Find the IP address you’re hosted on. You can do this from a CMD prompt by typing ping thedomainname.com. You could also ping the domain at network-tools.com.

2. Visit Bing and search the IP address by putting IP: before the IP address. (Example: IP:192.168.1.1)

3. The search should return all of the websites hosted on your shared server.

How Google Decides Your Page Is Worth a Top Ranking

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Anything you post on your blog appears on Google almost instantly these days. Real-time search is becoming more and more important. After observing how some of my top articles perform in Google rankings for 5 years now, I think I’m beginning to understand a newer part of how Google ranks its pages. As with all people who try to figure out the Google algorithm, this is just what I think happens to my pages when I make a post based on what I’ve observed.

1. Google learns you posted something via ping. It puts it in the index immediately. If your site already has authority, you’ll appear in the first page of results for a related search term.

2. For about 24 hours, you’ll continue to appear on the first page of results because your post is timely and relevant. During this time, Google is also measuring the visitors that visit your site. Do they bounce? Do they search again after they visit?

3. After about 24 hours, your page disappears from the first page of results because it is no longer timely and hasn’t been fully evaluated by Google to stay there permanently. The page has either fallen to pages 2 through 20 or isn’t in the index at all.

4. After about 3 days to a week, Google has now had a chance to crunch the numbers on your post. It measures the true keyword relevance and how useful it was to the people who visited it during the first 24 hours. The post appears in its rightful position in the rankings. Hopefully on the first page. 🙂

So what does all this mean? To me, it means that the quality of your post matters now more than ever. Google is finding new ways to make sure your post is useful and relevant based on the behavior of your visitors. It’s not all just anchor text and PageRank anymore.

SEO Isn’t Only About the Keywords You Use

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People spend a lot of time trying to figure out different combinations of keywords to use in their posts. There’s so much focus on using certain keywords that sometimes writers don’t pay attention to the keywords that shouldn’t be included in their posts.

I recently wrote a post about how to make it through a Nintendo DS video game called Diabolical Box. I was aiming to make the post turn up in search engines when they search for tips about this game. Instead, I was turning up in searches with keyword combinations that included the word “tap”. This was because I used the word “tap” (on Nintendo DS, every motion is done with the tap of the pen on the screen) several hundred times in my post. Because of this, Google came to the conclusion that my post was about tapping something apparently.

So in this post, it would’ve been a good idea to mix the words “touch”, “choose” or “select” throughout my post instead of “tap” or “tap screen” 100% of the time.

Google is smart, but it’s still really just a computer that is trying to judge what your page is about based on keywords. Keep the repetitive junk out of your posts and reap SEO rewards.