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Pretty Sites are Good for SEO
The web is a constantly evolving place and search engines adapt and change to reflect this. One of the big innovations coming along is image-based searching and the increased use of site thumbnails. This is why I say that pretty sites will be good for your SEO. As more and more site and page thumbnails are embedded into search results many webmasters are going to have to re-think how their websites are laid out. The use of images at the top of the page and the use of bright colours and banners to attract the eye. This is a whole new approach to SEO and web page design.
Even now it's amazing how many people use image searches to find things on the web. They look for an image and come across a page in your website as a result. And this trend can only increase in the future as image searches, video searches and other search types are integrated into the 'standard' web page searches of the search engines.
This means that you are going to have to pay more attention to the 'alt' tags of the various images on your site. Make certain that they are relevant and that they actually correspond to what the image is displaying. Also pay attention to the text surrounding the image. Make certain that this is relevant and again reflects what the image is showing. An easy way of doing this is to add a caption to your image (very easy to do with CSS).
What we have here is a whole new evolution of the SEO ethos. Partly it's standard SEO stuff, but applied to images. Now we're aiming to help the search engines find and accurately index the various images on your site. You're aiming to keep the descriptions of the images you have accurate and to add text to and around images that will help in defining what those images (and the content of your website) represent. This is also useful for many social networking sites who also seek an image from your site or web page that will represent that web page.
But the most important change is the common use of page thumbnails. This is a whole new ethos of SEO and goes to the heart of usability and user experience. It's where the 'science' of SEO techniques meets the 'art' of designing beautiful pages.
You are not only going to have to prepare your pages to be SEO friendly to the search engines, and to have good content for your site visitors but you are also going to have to make the pages look elegant. What's more they will need to look good not just in full-screen mode but also when shrunk down to thumbnail size as they will need to stand out from the crowd when an user glances at the image.
The revolution is coming and you had better start thinking about image optimization as part of your overall SEO strategy now.
If you are truly serious about your SEO and making more income on the internet then you have to grab yourself a free copy of the How to Maximize your Web Traffic and gain lots of money eCourse.
About The Author
Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs an SEO information and consultancy service. He is also responsible for the Celtnet Articles free article submission site and provides SEO-friendly one-way links to donors for his One Million People campaign to help the children of Liberian refugees displaced by civil war to Senegal.
Previously on SearchEngineChannel
- 4 Web Site Optimization Tips You Can Implement Right Away
- Top 5 Advantages of SEO Over Traditional Advertising
- SEO, the HTML Source Code and Competition
- Link Popularity, Link Reputation & PageRank
- 5 Tips to Improve Search Rank
- 7 Winning Search Engine Optimization Tactics
- Web Traffic: Is Using Google Adwords The Right Way?
- Social media optimization : A new theme for publicity
- The SEO Website Overhaul - 5 Small Changes for Better Rankings
- Website promotion via Social Bookmarking & Social Networking
