Top Five SEO Tips You've Never Heard - Explained

When reading an SEO blog, you typically see the same thing every time, every post:
1. Watch your Title Tags
2. Content, Content, Content.
3. Internal Linking.

You know these things right? It's also a rare bird when the writer actually explains what they mean and tells you how to implement it. That was the purpose of you reading the blog; so you could implement this sort of stuff yourself. Well here's something you've never seen before: an SEO specialist helping you implement effective strategies that can boost your page ranking. Shocking.




Top 5 Unheard of SEO Tips, Explained


Keyword Optimized Image Names
Have you ever done a Google image search, and found a ton of stuff that has no bearing on what you actually searched for? This is more common, and a good chunk of images on the internet (and websites too) simply won't be found because people name them something like bk_1f.jpg. That's not very informative. When optimizing a page for SEO, take a hint from your chosen title tags and body copy. If your page is about organic fish food, name your images as such. For example: if it's hard to distinguish, name them something like organic-fish-food-bg.png (the bg may stand for background), but you can make your own code work for you. This way, you'll not only come up in search easier in Results Pages, you'll come up in search for users looking for Images about Organic Fish Food. Nice huh?

Background Images vs Onpage Images
When getting your website built, let your developer know up front that you want important images to NOT be background images. First of all, background images don't print out - so if someone prints your nice website out, they won't get half of what's there. Also, background images aren't read by Google bots. This means you can't apply a great optimized name, and alt text is all but obliterated. Do this up front so your developer doesn't have to painstakingly extract all images out of the CSS and input them into templates.

<em> vs <i>
If you're a programmer, you know what this is. If you're an SEO, you better know what this is. And if you're staring at the above HTML tags going, 'Huh?', then let me clue you in. Body copy keywords are often emphasised to bring attention to the page using bold or italics. However, Google tends to favor the <em> or 'emphasize' HTML tag over the <i> or 'italics' HTML tag. It's something people may not consider, but an extremely important one.

NoFollow Archives
If you've got a website with a blog, and I'm sure you do, make sure your tags, categories and archives are all 'No-Follow/No-Index'. Indexing articles and blogs found behind several different url strings can cause major duplicate content issues. So ask your website designer or SEO specialist to make sure your developer is adding no follow/ no index meta tags onto your archive, category and tag pages. It will save you in the end!

GZip = Speedy Website
GZip is a nice way to speed up your website, which is a major player in SEO. If your website is slow, your bounce rate is going to rise, and people will generally leave your site sooner rather than later. If your Website Designer or Developer is not already aware of this genius tool, invite them to try it out - it will help your site speed immensely by downsizing large image files and Javascript files on your server.