Learn SEO | Search Engine Optimization Tips and Techniques

Finally after several years of encouragement my wife is starting her own Blog. LifeAtTheHairSalon.com is about 25 years of stories and life at the hair salon.  She has a quarter century worth of stories about hair salon life, some funny, some happy, some sad but all real.  I am excited for her and between her writing talents and my SEO experience (tooting my own horn) I fully expect this to be a huge success for her.

Once she has her first group of postings up and the blog is set up and formatted I will post it again.  Good luck Paula.

Want to get backlinks to your blog? Set up blogs for others and modify the footer code to include a link back to your site/blog.  It is that simple. True there isn’t any link juice being passed back yet but you never know when todays PR0 will be tomorrows PR6 with 20,000 RSS subscribers.  Take it a step further and recommend your favorite website host and collect an affiliate payment for referring your “free blog setup” client to their hosting service.

There it is ….. simple isn’t it.

What is your simple tip for increasing inbound links.

I have been reading Garry Conn’s blog for quite some time now and he offers a lot of good advice.  I have been dealing mostly with larger websites for my money making efforts and have only just recently started to explore niche blogging for income. Garry has developed an eBook that I opted to purchase called “CyberCoders Wordpress Niche Guide” and I am going to put it to the test. I don’t doubt that if I follow his instructions I will be able to build a niche blog that generates income.  He doesn’t promise overnight thousands like so many other ebooks and sites that offer advice. What Garry does is offer good solid advice.

So with that said I am going to use the Wordpress theme he has developed and follow his instructions and see what happens. I have registered a couple domain names in some niches that I think will do well.  My goal is to set up one niche blog a week.  Let’s jump in and see what happens.

I highly recommend reading Garry Conn’s blog posting titled “Make Money Online By Building Profitable Niche Blogs“

I have a background in Visual Communications (old school graphic design with cold press and hot press illustration board, rapidographs and letraset press on letters).  In the old days image and color and composition was everything. Your ad had to jump off the page and capture the viewer and make him or her pick up the phone or visit your brick and mortar – no Internet here. Then came websites and photoshop and fireworks and computer graphics. Now all of a sudden you could do extraordinary things that were before not possible.

Carrying over old school design techniques and style does not always work on websites however. I am finding that by keeping websites simple in design and functionality makes that website for SEO friendly. While heavy graphics may make your website look fabulous it may not be good if you want to be found on the major search engines. In the case of websites I am finding text is often times better.  I mean real text, not graphic text. Search engines read text, they do not ready images (unless you use alt tags and name your photos and graphics correctly). There is a balance between the right amount of text, the placement of text and the placement of supporting graphics. In the long run I have found that less graphics and more text (not too much though) is better for SEO.

What is your opinion of this?

Do you use a Title Tag or Alt Tag or both on your graphics and photos?  I have seen a lot of comments on this subject and suprisingly (at least to me) most people opt to use one or the other but not both. My experience has been that using both tags greatly enhances your SEO efforts if used correctly.

Just a quick recap for those who are new to this subject. The title tag is what you name your photo or graphic and the alt tag is the alternative text that you see when you roll your mouse over an image (not in firefox).

Naming your photos and graphics correctly is very important for your site.  For instance the title of a photo should be something like “trucking_jobs_banner1.jpg” rather than DS00911.  The use of your site keywords in the title tag makes your images easier to find, leading your website to be easeir to find. Especially if people are searching through Google images.  This used to hold true for Yahoo images but it appears that Flickr images are the primary source for image searches.

The alt tag is the text that you write in to support your image. In addition to providing your site with extra keywords for the search engines, there are those rare cases where web surfers have turned off the ability to view images.  Instead of having a red X you have your descriptive text show up.  Of course as mentioned earlier, when using MS IE you can see the alt text pop up when you run your mouse over the image or photo.

My opinion and experience is to use both tags and take advantage. Be sure to vary your titles and tags slightly so as not to appear to be spamming the system.