There are a lot of factors that go into a successful SEO strategy that can enable your website to gain additional traffic through good ranking on search engines.

With over 360,000,000 image search queries performed per month across the major search engines, the process of optimising your images for the web should not be ignored.

Below are a few tips for optimising your images in order to improve your overall website’s performance for search.

Optimise image file names for best SEO results

It is important that you make the name of the image file keyword rich and that the words are relevant to the content of your page. Use hyphens (-), instead of underscores (_) in your file names to separate words.

Example:

An image may be originally named “DSCF1473.jpg” and so does not do anything to boost SEO. It should be renamed to “optimising-images-search-engines.jpg” (obviously keywords relevant to your content!)

Optimise image file size for best SEO results

Use good quality pictures, ensuring that your images are literal and connected to the content of the page, such as a photo of a product. It is also recommended saving your images in .jpeg format for photos, .gif for animations and .png for logos and buttons.

Ensure that your images don’t adversely effect your website page’s fast load times, make the image file size as small as possible (without sacrificing image quality). Utilise the “save for web” feature that is found in PhotoShop to reduce the KB size to 50 to 75% quality (compression) and set the dpi to 72.

If you don’t have PhotoShop installed on your computer, there are free image resizing tools such as Picnik, which are available online.

Please note: The image file size should not be confused with the dimensional size you see on your screen. You can display a 900px wide image across your page and it may only be 25kb in actual file size.

Use the image ‘title’ attribute

The title of the image should include your keywords and be relevant as possible to the image and content on the web page. We recommend maintaining shorter title, approximately four to six words will suffice. See below for how to enter title tags in WordPress.

Use the image ‘alt’ attribute

Make sure that you use the alt attribute of the image tag as this also is understood by the search engines. Again, the alt attribute should contain a relevant description of the image, again with keywords relevant to your content.

The WordPress image editor is found by clicking on the Upload/Insert media icon just above the content box within each page or post. To edit an image using the image editor  after you have inserted it into a page/post, simply hover over the image within the content box and click on the Edit icon on the top left side of the image.

The screen shot above shows this screen from WordPress and highlights where to enter the various things mentioned in this article.

The aforementioned tips take little time and can easily be implemented into your website’s ongoing SEO strategy, thus enabling your images for maximum search engine benefit.

We are looking for an extra Graphic Designer to help us out for the month of February.

This opening would be ideal for a designer that is currently working freelance or is between contracts. We are based in Narrabeen on the northern beaches of Sydney. We don’t require the work to be done face to face as long as you’re available during Sydney business hours and willing to work via Skype.

We have work for the entire month of February, probably 3 days a week would be enough, but if you have more time available then we have the work!

The work involves:

• Modifying existing WordPress themes to suit individual clients (Read: creating photoshop mockups)
• Creation of new web site interfaces from a brief (Read: more photoshop mockups)
• Creation of images, banners and other resource for current and new sites
• General web design, ad hoc things that will come up

Experience with WordPress would be great but we can show you what you need if you don’t have this. You don’t have to be a coder, this overflow work is more about front end design.

If this sounds like you or even mostly you please get in touch using the contact form below.

While we all know the benefits of SEO and maintaining fresh and engaging content on your website, you may not be aware of some important on page factors which can greatly increase your rankings in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). We have covered these fundamental components that determine how your website is displayed on search engine result pages specifically for the WordPress Thesis framework in a previous post.

Outlined here are specifics when you’re using the WordPress Genesis theme framework.

A. Title tags for SEO

The fields “Custom Document Title” is where you control the title of the web page. Title tags are one the most important elements on your page for SEO purposes. It’s the first opportunity to to tell search engines what your page is about, search engines weigh this particular tag heavily when indexing and ranking web pages.

B. Use the Keyphrase in your Meta Description tags

The field “Custom Post/Page Meta Description” is the field to enter your description to match the content of the web page. When people search on Google for a specific keyword that you have included in your meta description field, Google bolds the keyphrase in the search results. So, while it may not boost your rankings, from a users perspective, it will call more attention to your searh result and entice people to click through to your website.

Ultimately, you’re writing the meta description to entice people to click through to your website.

C. Custom Post/Page Meta Keywords

In 2009 Google announced that they do not support use the keyword meta tag in its web search ranking and therefore this field will have no influence in your search engine ranking.

It is however useful for other search engines to include 3-5 keywords in total, separated by commas.

D. Custom Canonical URL

Duplicate content can arise from the search engine spiders treating your web pages as two different urls, ie. www.example.com and example.com when in fact they are actually the same page of content. The canonical field gives you a way to help resolve duplicate content issues by telling the search engine the preferred URL.

E. Custom Redirect URL

If you have moved your site to a new domain or moved a page of content to a new page, you can use the custom redirect url field to ensure that users and search engines are directed to the correct page, making the transition as seamless as possible.

F. Robots Meta Settings

The Robot meta tags control how search engines index and rank your website. By specifying rules for the search engine’s indexing spiders you can control how your website is ranked on the web.

• noindex: prevents the page from being indexed and appearing in the SERPS
• nofollow: prevents the Google’s indexing spiders from following links from this page
• noarchive: prevents Google from showing the cached link for a page.

To allow search engines to index everything in your site, we recommend you leave these tick boxes unchecked.

Completing these fields for each page or post in your web site gives your content the best showing to Google and other search engines to index and rank your site well.

At TheDMA we encourage all of our clients to maintain a blog on their website as part of the business online marketing strategy. There are many benefits that enable you to create more opportunities, generate interest and increase income for your business.

Outlined below are some core reasons why an on going blogging strategy should be implemented on your website.

Blogging for SEO

Maintaining a blog allows you to regularly update  your website with fresh content which is indexed by the search engines. To enable your website to rank well on the search engines, it needs to have an abundance of freshly added content.

Each time you add a post, you increase the amount of content in your site. The more posts you have containing targeted and relevant keywords, along with fresh and up to date information, the more chance you have of ranking higher.

Establish Leadership Authority

A blog allows you to develop a voice for your business and gives you a way to share your experience. Sharing tips or advice and giving insight into the use of your products provides a way to let consumers know that you are a leader or expert in your field.

Blogs are a great way to speak to clients and customers and give them information beyond what is posted on your business website.

Blog Stucture

Often, you would like to keep your business website simple – a few pages describing what you do and how you do it. A blog provides a perfect arena to put all of the other information on your site without cluttering your main website pages.

Blogs give you the opportunity to organise the related information that may not be fully integrated into your existing website pages into organised categories, and archives. Adding a link from your website navigation to your blog will neatly place that information on your site for visitors to peruse.

Engage your Audiences

A business blog often tends to be more informal than the rest of the website. This can provide a great opportunity to engage potential customers and larger audiences through blog comments and links, allowing you to speak directly to your target audience.

Blogs are an affordable way to attract new users to your business website. A business can reach thousands and even millions of people through a blog creating new leads and opportunities for your business.

It takes time, a commitment and worthy material. You need to post regularly, provide information that’s valuable to your readers, and be willing to interact with and learn from your audience, and hence marketing your business more effectively as a result.

As the Christmas holidays approach and the year end gets closer, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners and clients for your valued patronage and for allowing us to be of service to you.

We wish all of you a relaxed and safe Christmas and New Year to be filled with much joy and happiness.

We look forward to working with you all in 2012 and the continued success of our partnerships.

TheDMA office will close on Wednesday 21st December at 2pm and will reopen on Monday 9th January 2012.

Yesterday the new 3.3 version of WordPress was released, read on for a quick summary of the changes.

Dashboard improvements

New Admin Bar

The Admin Bar was introduced in version 3.1 to give quick access to commonly used menu items, in both the administration area and when a logged in user is viewing the front end of a WordPress web site.

There’s a new version that fixes some sizing problems and changes the placement of of the menu items. It certainly does groups things together for a more condensed and useful menu.

Tool Tips

These will guide users through the core WordPress screens but they are also available to developers to provide more interactive help to users of their plugins and themes. Pictured here they sit on top of the interface to provide detailed help and tutorials.

At TheDMA we’re a keenly developing these new tool tips to be able to provide inline help for our customer web sites.

Admin Menus

The left hand menu has also been updated, featuring fly out menus the new layout aims to be more usable while still keeping all commonly used options easily accessible.

Media uploader

Apple is not the only one giving Flash the flick. The media uploader in WordPress 3.3 says goodbye to the Flash version and replaces it with an HTML 5 tool that features drag and drop of files, instant resizing of images and sort tools to sort the media library by file type.

The removal of flash will also mean better compatibility with mobile devices connecting to the WordPress administration.

Permanent widgets

This feature will certainly be popular with our team. Widgets often hold the content that is displayed in sidebars and footers. Until now they were tied to themes, so when you changed themes you would loose the contents of the widget. Now in 3.3 the widget content stays between theme changes.

Adaptive interface for WordPress Administration

With 3.3 comes an update of the familiar WordPress admin screens to make the interface more effective on a range of devices. This means that the interface will change to suit the device that you’re using to connect. So logging in to your administration screens on a device like an iPhone or iPad, you’ll find that it looks and behaves more consistently.

This is a work in progress, version 3.4 is slated to have a fully responsive interface that will take this concept to completion.

It’s true that there are apps for some devices like iPhone and iPad but not all of the functionality of the desk top version is not available in these apps. Now it should be possible to do everything on an iPad that you can do via a normal computer.

Get updated!

If you’re a customer on TheDMA Maintenance programme your site will be backed up and upgraded to WordPress 3.3 in the coming weeks, if not please contact us to organise an upgrade of your website installation.

This time of year is great for looking back at the past twelve months. Not just with nostalgia, but with an eye towards learning what influenced our industry, our activities, and even your business!

We’ll be following up this with a series of posts in 2012 on how to harness online marketing trends to grow your business.

We started the year thinking about Online Marketing Trends for 2011, and in this review, we’ll just touch on the 5 big movers that we think will influence your business – some of these were there in 2011, and of course, some are new!

1. Mobile Internet Usage

Mobile internet usage is up 50% according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while overall internet access grew 17% in the same period. Mobile internet access is counted as mobile broadband, mobile phones, and tablet computers such as iPads.

Australia has gone from lagging in smartphone and mobile internet use, to being a global leader with the second highest penetration of smartphone usage, according to Google. The number of people accessing the internet on their phone went past 50% in 2011, and with the refresh rates for mobile driving adoption of smartphones – the number of people with internet on their phone is expected to top 70% in 2012.

The interesting part of this is how active these users are on their mobile internet – 40% use search daily, and then call the business, read reviews and look them up on maps.  This data and other interesting graphs from www.ourmobileplanet.com.

Clearly, if your website is not mobile compatible, then you are going to be missed!  Check out point number five if a mobile website is on the top of your list for 2012.

2. Social Media for Business

Looking back on it now, 2010 was all about the buzz of engaging in Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn being the big three).  And in 2011, most of the companies we worked with and talked to took a much harder look at Social Media use, with a real focus on measuring the benefit and return on investment.

This included active monitoring of website traffic sources. Applications in Facebook to get people to sign-up for newsletters, or submit enquiry forms within Facebook topped the interest tables.

Recent stats show Facebook users topped 10 million in Australia in 2011. Facebook remains a powerful tool for B2C brands, but just as companies are looking for the return on investment – individuals on Facebook are also increasingly looking at what’s in it for them. In November Facebook upgraded Insights, their analytic tools, to provide brands with better measurement on the reach and engagement for posts and content.

The real question for 2012 is how can you put your business and brand out in social media, in a genuine, authentic, real way? If you can do that, you are more likely to create a real connection with your customers in social media, and therefore make a real impact on your business.

3. Online Reviews and Virtual Word of Mouth

In March, Nielsen Research released The State of The Online Nation. This confirmed our belief that customers are increasingly engaged with brands, especially reading and adding to online reviews. Nielsen found that 73% had read reviews, and 26% do so on a regular basis. On a more active level, 46% have commented, and 33% post new reviews. This will only accelerate with the arrival of Yelp Australia – the popular US site that pulls over 20 million visitors a month and has reviews for every kind of business – from hairdressers to haberdashers.

This is a critical part of being engaged with your customers. You can manage your listing in Yelp, respond to reviews, and be an active participant. You can do the same in other review sites, directories and social media. Extending customer service into these areas provides a tremendous benefit to the companies we have worked with, so I’m sure it will for yours as well.

4. WordPress for Websites

The popularity of WordPress continues to grow. Stats released this year by WordPress.org found that 22% of all new websites in the USA in 2011 were built using WordPress.

As far as a content management system goes – WordPress has a 55% market share. These numbers are back-up by Google Insights – showing the steady rise of searches for “wordpress website”.

WordPress continued to develop in 2011, with Version 3 released, and a raft of new features. And of course, lots of new plugins including a few released by us here at TheDMA.

The sophistication of WordPress continues to grow, and it used by a large number of complex and high profile sites – including the UK Prime Minister’s site #10 Downing Street.

5. Responsive Web Design

The term “responsive design” was coined by Ethan Marcote in 2010, where he argued that we web designers need a better way to present content on the variety of canvases we design for – including mobile phones, tablets, netbooks, large screens.

These can range from 1600 pixels wide, down to 320 on a smartphone. As we discussed earlier, the large number of people going online on mobile devices is accelerating these requirements, and Responsive Design is the most elegant and powerful way to meet these requirements.

Responsive Design creates a website that will automatically detect the size of the device, and re-scale, re-stack, and re-present that content to appear on the smaller canvas while still maintaining the design elements. Retaining the design and images also retains the branding and presentation of the site, and makes for a powerful and engaging site – from the desktop to the tablet to the smartphone.

At TheDMA we are starting to do custom sites with responsive themes, and in 2012, we will have a number of Premium Templates which are also responsive. Two interesting examples of responsive design are Food Sense and The Boston Globe.  When you open these on your desktop, grab the lower left corner of your browser and start pushing them smaller, more narrow, and see how Responsive Design works.

6. And Then…

And then … there were 6 in my list of Top 5 Trends.  Well you might call this 6+.

“+” as in Google+ arrives, and provides another social networking site, a way to recommend search results and web pages (you can + this page). This is a long term trend, as Google and Facebook look to add a social layer to the web, with the theory that this will increase the relevance and usefulness of links, searches, and of course, advertising. Very much in its infancy, but worth watching none the less over the coming years.

2011 will also be remembered as the year that Australian Retailers woke up to the reality of e-commerce. Australia lags the US and Europe in e-retailing as a percentage of overall consumer spending, so we expect e-retailing to accelerate in the coming years, as consumers embrace greater choice and lower costs.

Yellow Pages stopped printing, and went wholly online. Not happy Jan? Will this make you re-think your marketing ? It does mark the end of set-and-forget marketing, and may require some extra effort. But in return you will learn a lot more about your customers, and where they come from – what you do with that information is up to you.

2012

We’re not overly nostalgic here at TheDMA. We like to look back at stats, results, trends – learn what we can, and apply that to the future. If you are ready for some future thinking and present actions in your online marketing stay tuned to this blog as we bring you monthly online marketing up-dates in 2012, or get in touch and let’s talk about how we can help you achieve your goals in 2012.

Yelp Australia brings their local reviews and advertising to Australia.

Will Australian consumers use the site? How can you use it in your business?

Yelp Australia (at yelp.com.au) brings the popular Yelp format from the US to Australia.  Yelp Australia is a review site, which holds user reviews of a huge range of businesses – restaurants, retail shops, hotels, hairdressers, plumbers, dentists, financial services … even religious organisations!  Yelp unleashes the inner critic in all of us, allowing everyone to complete reviews and add their comments and virtual word of mouth.

Sites such as Australia’s Eatability and Urbanspoon have targeted the restaurant and cafe scene for a while, and Trip Advisor has been in the Australian market for hotels and accommodation, but often these have suffered from a lack of trust in the reviews.  Yelp claims to address this issue with a proprietary algorithm that culls suspicious, malicious or fake reviews which may come from competitors or from the business owners. Yelp also creates a trusted  set of reviewers, with the number and scope of a reviewer adding more weight to their reviews. Yelp also has a great advantage in being a source for reviews on any sort of business, making it a go-to site for consumers.

This model has worked well for Yelp in the USA, where it has some impressive stats:

• More than 22 million reviews,
• 20+ million unique website visitors a month
• its iPhone application is ranked the 15th most popular (ever), and there are apps for Android and Blackberry.

Yelp Australia, like the US parent, makes money from local business advertising on the site, with contextual ads also served by Google and Sensis in Australia. Listings and reviews are never influenced by the advertising. Yelp Australia is also partnering with Sensis to create their database of local business listings.

At TheDMA, we believe that Yelp will go extremely well in Australia. Research from Nielsen (March 2011, State of the Online Nation) found that Australian consumers are highly engaged across existing review sites:

• 73% read reviews, and 26% on a regular basis
• 46% have commented, and 17% do so regularly
• 33% post reviews on products and services

At Yelp Australia, Business owners can claim a free Yelp Business Account, which allows you to do a number of things:

• Manage the information on your business listing (hours, photos etc),
• Message your customers and reply to reviews – either publicly or privately,
• View analytics on your listings and reviews,
• Create “deals” and offer these to the site visitors (similar to other daily deals).

Yelp Australia brings the well known Yelp format to the Australian market, and at TheDMA we believe that this will be an important part of the growing location based marketing for businesses.  We include in this category your Google Place and Google Profile for individuals. Contact us if you’d like to discuss how these services can benefit your search engine results and marketing efforts.

Consumer search behaviour is increasingly localised, and search engines are getting better and better at determining where you are and returning results near your location.

Finally, if you have an iPhone use this link to grab a copy of the Yelp app.

Earlier this week we published a blog post: “Master your display on Search Engine Result Pages“, it talks in general terms about how to make the most of your listings on search engines like Google.

There is no doubt, getting users to click on you is a bit of a science that is well worth you thinking about, particularly as you are adding new content to your WordPress website.

We have put together this ‘cheat sheet’ to help our clients remember the important things when adding content to your WordPress website or blog.

Save this PDF file or print it and refer to it when adding content to ensure that you have the main points for Search Engine Optimisation taken care of.

Enjoy!

When thinking about search engine optimisation, commonly people focus on their ranking. Where am I on Google? Ideally we all want to be on page 1 of the search engine results and fair enough.

However, there is something else to consider – What do you look like when you get there?

Ironically it’s something that is overlooked more than you think. So in this article we’re going to show you how to control what your site will look like when people actually do find it on google and other search engines.

Below in figure 1 you can see the familiar view of what a site looks like when shown on a google search engine result page (SERP).

There are three main components to this:-

• The page title (HTML <title> tag) – shown in purple
• The page description (HTML meta description) – shown in black
• The URL (address) of the page – shown in green

Figure 1 - Example SERP result

Shortly, we’ll show you directly how to control 1 & 2, but first think about this.

A user is searching for a recipe for honeycomb, they are presented on the search engine result page 10 results at at time. It is human nature that a user is drawn to a listing that contains the keyword of what they are searching for and Google actually highlights the keyword in the result.

Give a user what they are looking for: if a page contains a recipe for honeycomb put Honeycomb Recipe at the start of the page title, users will be drawn to it.

Likewise, in the description that follows you have the chance to entice the user to visit your page, again use it tell them why they should.

In the screen shot below there are two things to learn.

1) The good and the bad. Have a look at the difference between A and B.

A clearly states the type of restaurant and where it is while B doesn’t do nearly as well. Your left wondering where the restaurant is and the result description, well it hasn’t even been considered.

2) The second thing to learn from this screen shot is how to control these two important things in Thesis / WordPress site.

The fields “Custom title tag” is where you control the title of the document and the one below “Meta Description” is the field to enter your description.

Figure 2 - The good and the bad of SERP listings

While we are big fans of Thesis as it has the ability to control titles and descriptions, the other tool that can do this is the plugin “All in one SEO”. Figure 3 shows similar fields to control the title of the document and the description.

All in one SEO plugin