Getting Creative with Content for Universal Search - Optimize What You Have
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It’s natural at this point to start thinking about ways to branch your content into different formats, once you know what you actually have to work with. I want you to put that idea on hold for the moment. You may have discovered that you have more different kinds of content on your site than you thought. Good for you! Are they all optimized?
If they aren’t, you know what your next step should be. Get that on-page optimization done! I’m going to start by talking about images here, because that seems to be an area that most people still forget to do anything with. Use alt text tags to give each image a good, concise description, with your chosen keyword in it if possible. Search engines can’t read images, but they can read alt tags.
Alt tags also let you give your visitors more information about an image when they hover over it. This is used to good effect in the online comic strip xkcd. If you’re not familiar with what happens when you add an alt tag, here’s an example from Wikipedia:
You should also optimize your images for size. I don’t mean actual physical dimensions so much (though that’s a factor too) but how much memory they take up. That affects how fast the image loads, and therefore how fast your page loads. Further detail is beyond the scope of this article, but image optimization information is freely available on the web.
While you’re updating your current optimization, you might want to do a little rethinking. Look at your page titles, for example. With blended search, it’s more important than ever that you stand out in the SERPs – not just to get the search engines to put you near the top, but to convince searchers to click on your link.
David Davies, writing for ISEdb, uses titles for his own company’s SEO site (Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning) as examples. Here’s his over-optimized version: “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services Company | Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning | SEO Services, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Consulting, Training & Copywriting.” And the version his company is actually using? “Expert SEO Services by Beanstalk.” They keep it short and easy to read so that the whole title will appear in the SERPs. “Our clickthroughs are much higher with shorter titles than longer and we have seen the same results with client sites,” Davies notes.
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