AdSense Case Study: Stage 3 Ends
Yes, I've finally finished Stage 3 of my AdSense case study. There are now captioned images on each page of the Invisible Fence Guide. The pages are still very plain — in the next stage we'll fix that — but the images definitely liven them up and make them more interesting. But let's talk about the search engine optimization aspects of images.
Search engines don't look at images, but they do look at the context of the image. Experiments done with Google's image search have shown that it's the text near the image that determine the matching keywords. When I say “near”, I mean the text immediately before and immediately after the <img> tag in the raw HTML of the page, not the text that displays near the image on the page, which may be different if you're using styles to explicitly position the image. Thus the recommended approach is to place the images in between paragraphs of relevant text and ideally to include some kind of caption. This is exactly what I've done with the case study. If you look at the source, you'll see that the images are all contained within <div> tags along with a relevant caption.
When you add a visually interesting (as opposed to purely decorative) image to a page, you should also set the “alt” property of the <img> tag. The “alt” property is used by visually impaired people to get a textual description of what the image represents. Search engines will look here, too, for more clues, but they don't place too much importance on it. Don't focus on the SEO aspects of the “alt” property, think instead about the humans reading the page. If your images have captions, don't just repeat the captions, otherwise the listener will hear the same thing twice — treat the “alt” property as a secondary caption.
And of course, be sure to specify the height and width of the image so that the browser can do proper formatting of the page before it loads.
That's it! Really, the hard part with the images is actually collecting and manipulating the images in the first place. Don't underestimate how long this will take.
We'll start Stage 4 of the case study shortly. In Stage 4 we make the pages look better using cascading style sheets (CSS).
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
 |
Enjoyed this post? Get free updates by mail or by RSS! |