Tag: web-design-article

If your post or page relies almost totally on images then it’s not easy to do effective Search Engine Optimization because in general, SEO focuses more on text than images.  Essential Reading Use Your Words

With images on websites you have four things you can optimize:

• file name (url)
• Description and title
• Caption
• Alt tags

The first thing you should consider: The image from your phone or camera is likely to be huge and have a stupid name (image url). These are 2 mistakes beginners make – leaving the image in it’s original size and not making use of the fact that google, for example, will use  the image url as part of it’s philosophy of determining what the page or post is all about. If you are promoting diving in Tenerife, for example,  then you might want to label your image ‘learn-to-dive-tenerife’. If you have more than 1 image then the second image might be ‘diving-in-tenerife’. Be inventive but get those keywords in!

How to resize and rename your images

Google will use the image it consider best, especially as regards size, as will Facebook, but more often than not it will be the first useable image it finds. If you have control of your page/post then you can select the image you want.

Example from Google

With Facebook, the appearance of your shared post will be affected by the size of the chosen image, i.e. do you want to show a big fancy image or do you want more words to read? A smaller image (say 200x200px) will give you more words as in the google sample image above, whereas a larger image will not have room for many words, as in the image sample below.

Statistically younger people like images and older people prefer to read something rather than just look at pretty images. It’s a balance and only you can make that call!

Example from Facebook

Resizing Images

An excellent free tool for resizing and renaming images online is Bulk Resize Photos

If you are looking for free websites then I assume you don’t have the patience/ability/time to learn to code, so I will keep this article brief. I  recommend you opt for WordPress, which not only has hundred of free themes but also thousands of free plugins to make life easy for you. Also there is way more free online support with WordPress

Typically a free site means a free domain name as long as you are paying for hosting. You can get free hosting from WordPress but it doesn’t look very professional, assuming you need that.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org: What’s the Difference?

One important thing to remember is that rarely is anything really free! Take care  with a free domain name. Make sure that it is truly yours and you know when they will release it to you should you wish to change hosting companies. You need somewhere to ‘keep’ your domain name and somewhere to host your site. It’s easier if they are with the same company and my recommendation would be GoDaddy or Hostgator using WordPress (not the free hosting option).

I personally use Hostinger but I have a private VPS server which I wouldn’t recommend unless you are very experienced. Their free domain option is great though and their customer service is on a par with GoDaddy, with Hostgator a close 3rd.

These are some of the more reputable companies offering a free domain:

• GoDaddy
• Hostinger
• HostGator
• DreamHost
• Bluehost

WARNING: Never lose control of your domain name

Make  sure you buy your domain name in your own name and keep control of it, whether free or otherwise. You can have your domain control and your hosting wherever you like, eg UK sites can host in the States and vice versa.

Those of you who are old enough may remember a time when we used to joke about people buying the Sun newspaper for the pictures and the Times to show how clever they were because they understood all the big words. Well those days are gone but there is still something to be learned from that sort of thinking.

Recently I have been adding free listings to Tenerife Pages and other sites, using peoples websites or Facebook pages to gather information for their links. I was stunned to realize that well over half the pages I looked at had very little text to say what it was they were actually trying to market themselves as.

So lets start with the 2 main reasons you want a mention on other websites or on social media.

1. People seeing that ‘advert’ get to know what you offer and hopefully contact you.
2. A link to your page or site raises the importance of it so  you get closer to the top when people do a search on Google, Facebook etc.

Example from Google

Take a simple example: Someone is looking for a Removals in Tenerife. It’s not enough for you to simply say you do removals – what sets you apart from all the others? People search for dozens of different phrases (keywords), removals, man with van, move to tenerife from uk, cheap  removals, quote for removals, local removals, pet transport, house removals, small removals and those are only a few of the search terms.

Images

Example from Facebook

If your site or page relies totally on images then it’s difficult to do effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) because in general, SEO focuses more on text than images. With mostly images or memes etc. can’t really do much about it.

With images on websites you just have four things you can optimize:

• file name (url)
• Description and title
• Caption
• Alt tags

Then leave rest to the search engines and hope for the best. With Facebook you are in the lap of the gods!

Text

Alt tags, descriptions and captions on your images are only useful because they use text. So even while doing SEO with images you can’t really ignore the words. Words are much easier to optimize than images. All you have to do is research your keywords and write adding those keywords with high quality content.

Facebook

Images aren’t helpful unless you write something to go with them. Well written posts can be shared (and hopefully re-shared) and give you some useful ‘link juice’ for your page.  Re-shared content, images and memes will help the originator but it will not help YOU much at all.

The Bottom Line

From the start of the internet, words are the winner here. The best way of doing SEO is a mixture of both. Normally, most posts already contain images so optimize those images with text to increase the chances of getting more traffic and higher positions in searches.

The ratio of text to images depends on who  you are trying to reach. Statistically younger people like images and older people prefer to read something rather than just look at pretty pictures and memes. It’s a balance!