The HTML standard format for alt tagging is via adding an attribute to the image tag, for example: img src=”image path code.jpg” alt=”image description”

In addition, ensuring an ALT attribute for each image is part of established accessibility standards (WC3 WCAG) as text only browsers can read the text contained within the ALT attribute.

Due to historic use as a spam tactic, text in ALT attributes is assigned a low weighting in most search engine ranking algorithms, but is important if the images are configured as hyperlink

According to him they have a pretty small percentage in the overall look of links in the Google index.

Well when I logged back on and visited their blog all that was there was a page with cut out paper letters saying ‘You’ve been hacked, if you don’t pay $xxx dollars in 24hrs you will site will be taken down’. This got me ‘thinking’ was it real had they really been hacked. Well what this turned out to be was a great piece of ‘link baiting’ so I followed this up to see if anyone else had noticed.

I clearly wasn’t the only one to have seen this; The blog explosion had already taken place and plenty of blogs were already blogging about it and were providing a link back to the site so you could see for yourself. The site in question blogged about it and the next day told everyone it was link bait, which in my opinion clearly worked by generating many inbound links.

So link baiting can be a great way of getting direct inbound links. Your link bait will have to be done in the correct way for your industry and some will work better than others.

The following guidelines should be considered:
1. Include a range of synonyms within the body copy, page title element and Meta description element.

2. Analyse internal site search to identify the synonyms used by users.

3. Research synonyms as part of the keyword analysis and selection process.

4. Tools for identifying synonyms include Thesauri and Word synonym suggestion tools.

5. Remember that search engine synonyms are not necessarily the same as those in a thesaurus.

6. Remember that the page title element is the call-to-action hyperlink visible in search engine results pages (SERPS), so it needs to be an effective call-to-action to generate click through.

7. Vary the use of key phrases and synonyms within link anchor text to related articles or web pages.

The following guidelines should be considered with web page layout:
1. Limit articles to between 200 and 400 words to make it easier to achieve keyword density.

2. Longer web pages are often found to be more successful in converting human visitors since different alternatives for persuasion are possible.

3. Remember other optimisation factors such as formatting such as the h1 header tags etc.

4. As home and channel pages tend to have the highest Google Page Rank, consider making these web page layouts longer to enable use of a wider range of key phrases and internal links incorporating key phrases

Here’s what Google have said it covers (around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics).

The video is fairly long though definitely one to keep on in the background and dip in and out to your interests!

Covers quite a lot of the ever expanding State of Google’s index and the enterprise it is!

Twitter links serving as backlinks.

It goes on to say that all the links on twitter are no follow but if you fall below the certain amount of characters for the tiny URL and manage to get your own domain on there, the search engines have been crawling and using them.

They have evidence of Google and Yahoo showing backlinks from twitter!

Over the last few years spam techniques such keyword stuffing and hiding keywords through text colour, scripting or cascading stylesheets (CSS), have led to algorithm changes designed to detect these techniques. Given these algorithm changes, content producers need to have a good understanding of on-page optimisation.

Keyword Frequency and Density
Keyword density indicates how commonly a keyword appears in a document as a proportion of its length. Check your keyword density with these tools. A keyword that appears twice in a 200 word document density = 1%) has a higher density than a word that appears four times in 2000 word document (density = 0.5%).

The following guidelines should be considered:
1. Write naturally but aim for a keyword density of between 3-8%.
2. Avoid a possible penalty by keeping keyword density under 10%.
3. Use synonyms as well as identical key phrases.
4. Vary use of keywords e.g. for key phrase ‘SEO’, variants could be
‘SEO companies’ or ‘SEO Services’ etc. Use
keywords or key phrases naturally within the copy.
5. Remember other optimisation factors such as formatting.