Website Basic SEO: Images and Links - Honey Do List Part 4

This week we continue the series of posts related to improving your company's web presence.

Past blogs have discussed simple usability testing, web design, and a basic SEO Review. Today I'm going to look at additional issues related to SEO. Some of this week's issues require a bit of HTML to identify or fix.

Using Images not Text for Content:

Does your website use images instead of text for large portions of its content? I don't mean are your navigation links images, or do you have product images nor am I talking about CSS image replacement. I'm talking about paragraphs of text (or headings) made of images. If you are not sure if your site was built using text or images here is one of many simple tests.

1. Open your web site your favorite browser.
2. navigate to the page you want to test.
3. Take your cursor and try to select a few words from the content of the page.

If you could select and highlight individual letters and words then that content is HTML text. Try doing that on the next paragraph. You will not be able to select the text because it is an image.

Why Care
Search engines, like Google, can not read text in images. By using an image instead of text your page is missing opportunities to be listed on search results.

Why Talk About This Issue
I was not planning on mentioning this issue, as I did not think it was common practice anymore. But last week I was talking to a friend, Will, who is doing freelance for a large retailer. He told me that they use a CMS which requires the page editors to understand HTML to add or edit content. In some cases, to get a graphic look, the editor will place an image into the CMS for a large block of content, instead of figuring out the HTML/CSS needed to build the page.

Building Internal Links Poorly:

Poorly built internal links come in two forms.

1. Text Links
2. Image Links

Google and other search engines look at links and "think" that they indicate what the target page is about. This gives that page a small search result boost for searches using the text in the link.

Text Links
Many web sites have links that say "Click Here" or "Read More". You should change the text of your link so it describes the target landing page. If your site has been indexed by Google you can use it to check for this issue. Otherwise you will need to manually view all the content on your website.

1. Open Google in your browser.
2. Enter "click here" site:www.yourdomain.com as the search term. (include the quotes "" around click here.)
3. See how many pages are returned by Google.
4. Click on a page and see if it has a link "click here".
5. Repeat steps 2 - 4 using the search term "read more" site:www.yourdomain.com .
   

If you have a link such as:

Click here to read about feeding goldfish.

Try changing your text to:

Read more about feeding goldfish.

Or better yet:

Learn about feeding lionhead goldfish

Image Links
(Some HTML Knowledge needed here) Web sites that use images as links often do not have "Alt Text" or "Title" attributes. Search engines will look at those attributes and include that information when they read your website.Check it out using the following procedure

1. Open your website in a browser.
2. View the Page's source
   There is no consistent keyboard short-cut for all browsers. In some browsers (FireFox and Chrome try Ctrl-U) otherwise look in the View menu for Page Source or Source. Most browsers let you right click on a page and then give the option to view "Page Soucre" in the list of available options.
3. Try to find the images you want to look at in your page's HTML code.
   
4. Look at the code for your image, does it have "Alt Text" or "Title" attributes.
5. Is the "Alt Text" descriptive of the image?
6. Is the image's "Title" attribute descriptive of the link's target page.

Here is what your HTML code might look like if you used those attributes.

Images that are not links only need the "Alt" attribute, they don't need the "Title" attribute, although it can not hurt.


Don't Stuff Keywords
Many first time webmasters try to stuff lots of keywords into these attributes. Resist the temptation. Search engines will penalize you for stuffing keywords in your image attributes and else where on your page.

Usability Tip
Also keep in mind that screen readers use the images "Alt Text" attribute.

Next week we will continue to look at other SEO issues such as picking out keywords.