Search Engine Optimization

Image optimization basics for websites

One of the largest components of a page are images. If there are too many un-optimized images on a page, the page loading will suffer. Here are a couple of quick wins for optimizing the images on your site.

The first and most important is to name and describe your images correctly. Google Image search accounts for 25% of web traffic to most sites and proper naming could result in a lot of traffic. First, rename your images to describe the content. Next, use title and alt text tags to name and describe the image again. Proper alt-tags help when a page hasn’t loaded, and the user sees only the bounding box of the image.

Next, ensure that your images are optimized for the page. Many designers throw in the largest image they have and set the image size in the page, without resizing the image. Resize and optimize images for the exact size you need them. There is a lot of freeware online that will allow and suggest the best ways to resize and optimize images for smaller file sizes. Smaller files mean faster load times, which is great for users and to rank better for Google Page Speed.

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Decrease loading times with these simple tips

Article Written by : Merchant Capital Inc

Over the last decade, web pages have been getting bigger and bigger. In the past a web page was mostly text and whatever images were part of the content. Soon after, there were ads but even those were small, non-animated and were hosted on the same site. Now the typical page is as big as 3MB, which was the size of the original Doom game. Here are a few ways to speed up your website and decrease loading times:

Minify

There are plugins for most of the popular CMS that will automatically minify existing content. This brings about a loading and processing speed improvement.

Image optimization

The biggest culprits in terms of file size on web pages are images. There is almost no optimization going into images. Often the images are far too large and could be a lot smaller to fit into the same space on the page.

Analytics

The more analytics services used, the more JavaScript there is to load from third party servers. If possible, only use a single analytics provider.

Ads

Another culprit are ad networks. Keep the number of connections low by utilizing only a single Ad network. At least then there will only be connections to one companies’ servers. The most efficient would be to negotiate direct Ads and host them on the same site.

CDN

Use a CDN to ensure that the benefits of these optimized elements are enjoyed by everyone. Content delivery networks use distributed servers to provide your visitors the content from the closest possible server.

Penguin friendly link building tactics

Article Written by : Top SEO Software Reviews

Now that the new Google Penguin has launched, there is a new focus on quality link building. Buying links or link acquisition from low-quality sources is no longer viable as a long term strategy. Now the relevance of such links can be erased very quickly. Fortunately, there are still some link building tactics that will not run afoul of algorithms like Penguin:

Link prospecting

Using Google itself and some advanced search operators, you can find resource pages or even directories that are ranked high and well maintained that will be willing to add your site. The better the content you have and the more relevant it is to the directories, the higher the chance that they will add you on request.

Competitor research

There are plenty of tools that can tell you who is linking to your competitors. Looking through this list should give you a few sites that you can get links from. Once again remember that like the above directories, ensure that you have high-quality content and offer value to the visitors of these sites.

Broken links

Use tools like Xenu or Screaming Frog and look for websites that have broken outbound links related to your niche. Build some content that is relevant to that broken link. You can now inform the webmaster of the broken link and then suggest that you have a page that can fill that gap. Websites are being shuttered every day, but links to them are still everywhere. It is like an untapped gold mine.