SEO tips - giving images a meaningful name

Sometimes things in life are so obvious that we simply miss the trees from looking at the forest. In search engine optimiation (SEO) this is particularly true of images we use on our website. I have noticed that nine times out of ten the images on a website are usually just given an alphanumerical name like "DSC421". Something worth thinking about and which will certainly help search engines recognise your content is simply to give your images a meaningful name. By that I mean if you are a photographer and have a website instead of the alphanumerical name why not call your image 'evening-view-of-Athens" if it were a photo you had taken of Athens at sunset. Why bother, you ask yourself?
The most important thing to bear in mind is that search engines recognise text, they can index words but they cannot recognise or index pictures or images. Thus if you call your photograph "DSC421" this will mean nothing to a search engine. Should you name the photograph 'image-of-evening-view-of-Athens" then at least the search engine will index this text. This technique I also find useful when I am blogging. To give any blog a little more attractive appeal, it is always wise to include images to break up the text. Here again I name the images in accordance with the context of what I am writing about in my blog post. Anyway, try it yourself and I believe it is something which requires little effort and which you will not regret.

Getting found on the web - work for it!

Let's face the truth - no matter how discouraging it can sometimes be. Today to get found on the web, you have to work for it very hard. That's why we get bombarded with all sorts of offers in our spam box promising to get us high on the search engines in 48 hours, others showing their clickbank and paypal accounts and how they are making thousands of dollars/day. Why, have you ever asked yourself, are these people so anxious to make us rich and not just continue making their daily thousands. The answer is WE ARE their daily thousands - but only if we are stupid enough to believe their get rich quick spiel and chuck $47 or whatever out the window at them. Of course those endlessly long html emails are psychologically well prepared, they have put a lot of thought into them and some of them one could even consider convincing but then again you just ask yourself the question, why do they want to make me rich and see which answers you come up with.
The truth is there is no get rich quick on the Net today and frankly I doubt if there ever was. The answer is a long hard up-hill climb with a website trying all the known ways of legally getting better visibility. There is no other way, believe me. Overnight fame and riches through lnk farms, through clickbank digital products, through SEO scams, through viral marketing, whatever new name these marketeers come up with - it is crap.
The only way to get a market on the Net today is to constantly and consistently work to become an "authority" website - no easy task among the over 100 million sites currently in existence! Building trust with your visitors, that is the only way they will come back gain. Offer good quality information, offer useful information and offer USEFUL information, that is what brings visitors. Do a little test yourself on Twitter and post really valuable info on visibility on the web and yo will be surprised at the number of hungry followers you will get within hours. Everyone wants in on the secret of Internet success. But the answer is not in falling for cheap scams.

Is SEO on its deathbed?

The more one listens to the latest news escaping from google, the more I wonder what the future of search technology will be. Many are already convinced that the original criteria we used to optimize our pages are no longer of interest to an increasingly sophisticated google. For example the idea of the importance of keyword density seems to be fading into the horizon as google's analysis of a site is much more more efficient than a word count and comparing it with the keyword.
Now we hear of google "caffeine" to make its searches more fast and more accurate. It would almost seem as it the concentration in the search engine war is going to be on content - which makes sense. But how will google decide on what is relevant information, how will google rate what is accurate information. Succeeding in doing so will definitely be to the benefit of the google user but will it benefit the website owner?

The Internet paradox - write yes but don't get seen on the web?

There does seem to be a certain paradox in web publishing at the moment and I am wondering what solution the "big boys" are going to come up with. Now the talk is all about social networking - Get on the web and write your blog and twitter and youtube and facebook it. No problem, we have made all the software so easy to use you do not have to be a rocket scientist to publish a reasonable blog. Just come with the ideas and the good content and we will do the rest for you. Great!
But just a thought. That is fine for getting your words of wisdom on the Net but what about finding them? And that is what I mean by the paradox.
Anyone who publishes on the Internet, does with the intention of being read. But what if yo have to spend more time getting visibility for your website than actually creating the contents. This is a very real prospect as publishing becomes easier but getting found on the net gets incrasingly difficult by the day.

Making search engine mistakes I cannot correct.

It is incredibly easy when setting up a blog or a website to make mistakes which cannot be corrected at a later date. I should know because I just did it. One underrated but critically important factor is naming your website. It is highly recommendable to think of how a search engine would treat the name before taking a decision. Let me give you a simple example. I opened a blog which is entitled "Moving to Greece". Nothing wrong with that you might think. You are very wrong. WHY?
Simply because in terms of how a search engine views the title, in terms of search engine rankings I am competing with every removal company in the world which offers house removal services to and from Greece. Naturally I only realised this when I came to look at how my blog was doing on g00gle. And I can now do nothing about it. A blog name cannot be changed and any SEO work I do will still has the disadvantage that my blog will compete with the wrong niche. What is to be learned from the story. When chosing a name for a website - THINK CAREFULLY how search engines might interpret the site name.

Google its really frightening - but true.

We have all come to get used to speaking about one gigabyte of storage space as if this were something of everyday use. Let me give you a comparison to get a perspective on what we are talking about. One byte of information is the storage space we need to store one letter of the alphabet. Let us say that this is the equivalent of one grain of rice. If we are speaking about one gigabyte of information this is enough rice (or, more correctly, bytes) to fill two large containers of this size. Now that is a lot of rice - enough actually to feed everyone in a large city one good meal of rice. But more importantly, what does it take to find two grains of rice in these two containers - then you must have them well marked, I would say. We are talking about exactly the same in terms of search technology. Google, for exmaple, can pick out the two grains from the two containers.
. Now if we leave the gigabyte and the terabyte and come on to the petabyte we are getting into the dimensions that google can relate to. One petabyte in terms of rice is equivalent to 20 ships full of those containers we were talking about. And guess what? Google handles 20 petabytes per day. A lot of rice and a lot of info.

Little wonder their electricity bill is over $1 million per month!

Where are the datarati?

Nice new word, eh. Datarati has just been coined by someone no less than the chief economist at G00gle who was asked recently to predict the skills that will be required of a future work force. His answer? The profession of the future is the statistician - someone who can interpret great laods of facts and figures.
In the context of the Internet he is talking about those who have the technical ability, for exmple, to look at google's website optimizer or google analytics and on the basic of the information contained there make sound recommendations for a business. Through scienticially testing various approaches these statisticians should be able to indiciate what sells and why it sells.
Many would counter such a prediction with scepticism as statistians are not really known to be at the cutting edge of the corporate world. They might be able to interpret data but does this mean they can make clever and profitable business decisions based on this data? I think this is a very good point. You can be a brilliant mathematician but a hopeless businessman.
So a number of questions?
Are the jobs of the future related to the Internet?
Will the life of a business depend on its visibility?
Will search engine optimization growth in importance as a skill and a profession?

Why has the industry left visibility up to the user? Is content king?

This may seem a strange question but there are two sides to every coin. My question could be rephrased. Why is it the task of the website owner to ensure his visibility - this makes the web into one great optimization competition with but a few exceptons. Why do we have to do the work to get visibility?
After all, in the world of the written world before we had the electronic word, the content of the book decided its popularity on that great mental seatch engine of the human race. If a book was good it sold itself - see Shakespeare - still selling - see the Bible - still selling. So is ti fair that you be good on the Internet you really have to know the rules of the search engines to get that much desired and essential visibility. Without that you are lost - like it or lump it.
The essentia point I want to make is that you could be the most gifted author in the world, you could be a possibel Nobel Prize candidate - but will that make you visibile on the net, your content alone?

A question for you ....

I have a site which consists largely of pictures. The site is dedicated to Greek designer underwear - Greek designer underwear. How can I optimize such a site. Every suggestion and idea is welcome.

Is it google's fault that I can't spellllll ?

Off topic again but an interresting one all the same - and from a source which is not a sensationalist one - the Economist. It claims in this week's edition that google, sites like facebook and twitter are having a disastrous effect upon the spelling ability of our children. This set me thinking and basically I came to the conclusion that I have never seen as many misspellings in my life as on the Internet. I have been made consciously aware over the past years that the average level of spelling on the Net is poor. But is this the fault of the Internet? I believe not.
While I do agree that if you are confronted constantly with bad spelling then you will never learn how to spell a word properly if 9 times out of ten you see it misspelt. But I do not believe that it is at fault, I think we must look first and foremost at our school systems. I came from the old system where every night in elementary school I had to learn to spell 20 words. This is a exercise which I think today has vanished from the school curriculum.
Of course, to be fair they are individuals who would also claim that many of us learn visually and that if we are constantly confronted with a common mispelling we will assume eventually that this is the correct spelling. I have no argument to counter this as I do believe that we all learn in very different ways. Yet the social networking sites I visit are mainly populated by adults like myself and they did not learn to spell or misspell only through their use of the Internet in the past ten years.

Duplicate content?

We know that seach engines are aware of the practice of stealing content and in their indexation process they can very efficiently check if similar text exists somewhere else on the Internet. This, I believe, to be a sound policy to avoid plagiarism. But like everything it is not fool proof. Or better said, it has certain shortcomings. The point which worries me is that in certain instances I have been confronted with excellent content for the particular niche my website focuses on. I am tempted at times to quote from this source, duly giving due reference that this is quoted from such and such a source. I fear, however, that no matter what I do to ensure the reader knows I am not the owner of this information, g00gle and other search engines will simply do a trace when indexing, find the text appeared earlier. Usual search engine policy, I believe is to accept the earliest date of publication as the original owner of the material. So if the text is found quoted on my page I will be punished for duplicate content. Is this the way it works presently? Please correct me if I am wrong. The only other alternative I see to avoid the wrath of the search engines is to make a reference to the text in my webpage and link to it. Any other options? Comments welcome!

If my site is good enough visitors will come - REALLY?

The pure search engine optimizer will argue simply that if a site is good enough, it will attract visitors by itself. I wonder what they mean by if a site is good enough. Do they refer to content? search engine optimization? What particular features?
I completely discount this theory that you set up a website and just write and within a tolerable space of time you will have lots of visitors if you have chosen a popular niche. My experience is it simply does not happen.
And in this I am not alone. Basically in 2009 - NOT 1999 - and the web moves faster than we want it on account of the money at stake - your site has little chance of getting seen without constant optimizing, constant updating with quality information, constant searching for new sources of relevant inbound links. In other words visibility of a web site - with few exceptions to the existing 100 something million of them - is and will become increasingly hard to achieve and basically a full-time job. The whole issue of visibility is increasingly becoming a long, slow uphill climb wtih the peak at a formidable distance.
I think we have realised too late that the web has changed our lives in many aspects, the desire for visibility is directly proportional to the importance of the Internet in our daily lives. Actual visibility is inversely proportional to the importance the Internet plays in our daily lives.

My inbound links - impatient or just stupid of me

There is so much good advice around about how to improve your placement on search engines for specific keywords. And I believe that most of this information is useful and well-grounded. My problem is - it does not always work according to the maxims of the SEO textbook. Let me give you an example from my own experience and I await your comments and answers. There is general agreement in the world of search engine optimization that inbound links from quality sites are good for my website. I think few people would disagree with that. So far so good. I decide then to spend some time on placing comments on related forums. In my particular case, I am writing a travel blog so I post an answer to a specific question on a specific travel forum about the country which I am writing about. I even get quite a few reactions and thank you from forum members which would indicate to me that the information I provided was useful to them.
Why, then when I check my inbound links do I have non? The forum I am talking about is a .org site which should even enhance my chances of a good inbound link - but nothing, ziltch?

Ethics on the Net - between a rock and a hard place

This posting will make no sense if you do not read the last one on Internet - quo vadis?
Question - Do you think that private companies have the right to harvest knowledge from my blog and to use it for commercial purposes. Some of you may say well if you do not want such companies to index your content just put a no follow in your html and shut up. I believe that is not the point which I am trying to make. We all have the right to indexation by search engines, to being found on search engines and to getting good traffic from search engines. But can private companies use my knowledge in whatever form and sell it. Currently, in a macro sense it can. I spoke yesterday of filtering of 20 million blogs to predict movie successes.
This means basically I do not own what I am writing, others can make whatever use of this material for commercial purposes, right? So I have no inherent copyright on anything I produce and place on the Internet? right? Hmmmm ...... I have a little trouble with that, I am afraid. I mean g00gle is so fanatical about duplicate content etc. yet it has no trouble offering 20 million blog contents for "research" reasons. Sorry ..... I have a little trouble with that, as well. So obviously g00gle decides what is right and wrong, what is ethical and unethical in terms of copyright? My troubled face persists.
But sadly and basically there is nothing, absolutely nothing, I can do about it.

Should the g00gle algorithm apply to blogs?

I think it is a generally accepted fact that the number of in-bound links a website has, the more g00gle likes it. De facto, it would seem that g00gle assumes that the number of inbound links reflects the quality of the information contained on a particular webpage. One can plead this case but I believe that in the case of blogs, such an assumption can be very wrong. Without wanting to point to specific examples, I know of a blog page which ranks number 1 in g00gle for a popular search term. The blog actually has a total of three pages! Why number one?
Research by data-mining companies shows that unlike regular commercial websites, blogs generally have a large number of outbound links and a far smaller number proportionally of inbound links. Why? I would hazard a guess that the blogger is more interested in his/her content than a commercial site which is hell bent on getting visibility. So blogs are disadvantaged if we assume that the same algorithm goes for blogs as any other site - I believe it does and g00gle cannot automatically identify what is a blog and what is not.
Some may argue the Internet is a level field and blogs should be seen by search engines in the same way as any other website. Anyway, you can also answer by saying what other criteria can the serach engine use to decide on the quality of content. That is an excellent question and one I cannot answer immediately. But I woudl still claim that the importance of inbound links to blogs can distort the realitity in terms of this being a measure of blog content.

Internet and blogs - quo vadis?

The recent rise in social media and social networking through the Internet has interesting repercussions, not all of which are positive, I believe. Let me give you an example of current research which makes me, a simple webmaster and search engine optimizer, feel like a fly trying to scratch its way from the surface to the core of the Internet world - sorry, wrong perspective as we are all being told the Internet does not have a core of center.
I would deny such a statement when I look at the increasing spread of pervasive technologies with companies such as g00gle which, with its myraid email, blogging, search, news services etc. is trying to make itself the center - or one center, of the Internet - and making a damn good job of it if I may say so.
The Internet playing field is no longer level, it is very much tipped to the side of those who have the BIG money - like everything else in life. Basically, it is at present difficult to estimate what is really going on in the Internet and I see it reflecting equally the cycles of the REAL economy. Let me give you a small example.

I just discovered a company which I shall not name. This company can give you any data you want from blogs - it has indexed the full content of some 20 million blogs and is filtering and analysing the content with astounding success in terms of predictions. Blogs, basically, are an expression of individual opinion and with 20 million of them around this opinion covers a lot of topics. Blogs are equally a way of influencing and representing people. So Company X strips off the html and looks at the content, let us say of all blogs about movies. There are a lot.
Then using software which can identify what one would call positive sentiment - simple language parsing I assume - it can actually produce data from these 20 million blogs which gives a fair indication of what people are saying about a particular movie. This info can actually predict what the popularity of a particular movie will be in one week's time and has a success rate of some 86%.
Such is the current state of data mining from a blog like this one, amplified 20 million times. Now, without being paranoid, I can understand why we are all encouraged to blog, why we are given free tools to do so. The result is a billion dollar industry which is predicting successfully the future in the way I describe. What level of sophistication can such technology achieve? How ethical is such work? Are we busy creating monsters that are going to destroy us? I assume what applies to movies, as in the example I give, can also apply to cars, food, fashion - you name it.