Blind Ape Seo

A while ago, the old simian read Rob’s description of his website galaxy concept over at his blog Eurekadiary.

Sadly, his graphics skills are lacking, so here is a new diagram for you to enjoy:

The concept was nice and interest was piqued again when Rob announced that he was selling off one of his galaxies because he had lost interest. Having talked to Rob before, the blind ape started bugging him about a possible e-mail interview. Read more

Everyone in the industry knows the old adage

“Content is King” .

Well, for this to hold true, let me add a bit to it:

Search engine readable content is king

Sadly, this does not include your images (see my posts on how to change that here and here) or your flash games or your pretty videos.

It DOES however include everything you can do to describe them.
Working on that will bring you good and stable Search Engine traffic and is always on my list for SEO techniques.

Why would this be valuable?

For this article, I will present 1 example for a type of site that can make use of that.

Flash Game Arcades

Seriously almost NONE of them provide a written, clearly readable description of their games.

If this is you, here is a small calculation.
Say you have 200 hand-picked games (small, I know) and you provide only the title at about roughly 3 words per game.
Leaving all the navigational gibberisch aside, that leaves 3 words per game that a search engine can find and rate.
Not even necessary to mention that those 3 words won’t help a lot, cause they are ALL over the net, on every site that has that game. (600 for your WHOLE site)
If you just write a 50 word description for the game, you will have (50+3*200) 10600 words.
Now, most of those will probably not be relevant, but the visibility of your content will be much, much improved.

A lot of work? Yes.
Worth it? You bet.

Aside from the increased SE visibility, you will also differentiate your site from the pack and give valuable information to your users.
Hey, they might even bookmark your site because they like the snide comments and cheat codes you provide.
If you use adsense or another “intelligent” ad system, this will help targeting.

Take this to other endeavors and you’ll see immediate advantages over a lot of the competition.

Search engine readable content is king

I still can not believe how many webmasters ignore this.

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Now, young grasshoper, that you know how to get image search traffic to your site, you should focus on a worthier goal:

Targeted image traffic

I mentioned before, that I got one of my blogs onto the first image SERP for the term coffee.

Q: Did it help much?
A: Not really.

Keep in mind to get targeted image searches:

Optimize all your images that you want to appear in the image search and only those.

DON’Ts

• DON’T Give attributes to navigation images
  • Maybe even go as far as to name them something like navi_01.jpg, or menu_lower.gif
• DON’T give attributes / names to images NOT related to your keywords
  • If you have a cat picture on your ringtone page, name it pic01 .jpg, skip the title and alt tag

DO’s

• DO Give  EXTRA LOVING to  pictures that  are  related to your  niche
• DO Get high quality pictures, buy them if necessary!
• DO Don’t just call it smartphone.jpg, call it palm-treo-680.jpg
• DO Move some text describing the image into the same TD as the image (thanks, Eli)
• DO Don’t forget alt tags and title text
• DO Think about moving your affiliate link into a lightbox.

What is image search traffic?
Almost every SE under the sun gives you the option to search for images on the web. As a webmaster, this can be a blessing and a curse.
First of all, it is a curse when it comes to people stealing your image content. But then, who are we to throw the first stone?

Then comes the quality of traffic angle. Normally, people looking for an image on the web are looking only for the image and won’t spend any more time on your site.
The fact that your site is most often displayed in a frame below a top “navigation” frame that gives the surfer all the options he needs to display your image in full size doesn’t help. Using that frame, the user does not even have to interact with your site at all.

On the other hand, having your site display prominently in the image searches can give you some nice traffic. A fun blog of mine ranked quite nicely for “Kaffee” (German for coffee) for a while.

Now if we could just get rid of that top frame!

Javascript to the rescue.
This small snippet will kill the top frame and leave the user with only your page.

<script language=”JavaScript1.1″ type=”text/JavaScript”>
if (parent.frames.length > 0) top.location.replace(document.location);</script>

Yes, using it like the following will enable you to send the user wherever you like.
Use at your own risk.

<script language=”JavaScript1.1″ type=”text/JavaScript”>
if (parent.frames.length > 0) top.location.replace(’myURLhere’);</script>

Optimizing your images for image searches
SERPs for images do not correspond with text results.

From what I gathered (work and research) these things are important for image searches:
File name
Almost the only thing a SE knows about your image. This is actually weighed HEAVILY in image searches. My advice: Take the extra minutes and rename the file to reflect the picture’s content. I am always amazed at the number of porn pages still working with picture01.jpg.

Alt text
Again, the SE will only have secondary information about the pic. Use it.

Short example

Search for “tannenbaum” on google.com

The first three images are named “tannenbaum.bmp” and “tannenbaum.jpg” on arbitrarily named pages.
The third comes third ALTHOUGH the DOMAIN is tannenbaum.de

longdesc attribute
Some sources recommend typing a long description into the longdesc=”what a pretty picture” attribute, I can’t honestly tell you anything about that, as I have never seenm it used.

Other factors
After that, normal on-page factors come into play.
Result number 5 shows a page with a correctly named tannenbaum.jpg, but the text has nothing to say about it at all.
Bottom line

Don’t count on google finding the image for the transmogrifier if you name the picture CVR34677.jpg

Hope that helps.

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Description
Also known as “Project D” for the 47 day challenge, this is a small site about moleskines.

It is as good an example of a niche site as it gets.
The topic is the “moleskines” brand of notebooks, it is handcoded, took about 2 hours including content and is monetized via amazon.

One of the main reasons this works is the domain name.
All traffic is pure organic search results. I’ve done no more than link to it on some of my sites.
It brings in about 2 bucks a month and some more in Christmas season.
Last year it made about 50$ profit after subtracting hosting costs.

For those interested in ROI, it rings in at 400%.

Proven it’s worth, I want to give this little site some love and multiply its adspace.

Multiply your adspace times X using lightbox
Clicking on one of the dormant links in the wickedfire header will prompt a box to pop up, adding a dark layer on the site and shopwing a picture. Many people mistake this for a flash animation at first, but it is a small JavaScript called Lightbox.
The interesting part of lightbox is the description you can enter for the image. Turns out, you can enter HTML code to format your description.
This gives us the opportunity to enter the HTML needed for advertising.

Caution!
Javascript won’t work. So you’re out of luck with adsense, but any static HTML is fine.

For those interested in Javascript, flash, etc.. for something like lightbox, check out thickbox.

So what will I be doing?
Basically, collect a few nice moleskine pictures to display in my lightboxes. Add amazon to every lightbox. For 10 pictures, I can display 10 more ads.

Other Benefits
Lightbox has several benefits that should work well for advertising:

• It darkens the rest of the site, making the user focus on the image (and adspace)
• It does not interfere with the layout
• The user stays on the page while looking at the pretty picture
• The user is looking at something he’s interested in, you can display your ad right beside it

Setting it up
Download lightbox http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/
Read the Tutorials. (Really easy, it is just one page)
The script weighs in at about 5K, making it a lightweight addition to your site.

So I set this up for my product page here:
Collected an image of a lined moleskine, added a button “view details” which prompts the lightbox.
Set up the amazon link in the lightbox, using the small colorcoded moleskine icon.

How to enter the HTML code?
Well, saying “any html will work” is not quite right. You need to strip and/or escape some characters from your code to prevent it from breaking the Javascript surrounding it.

These are the less than sign < and quotation marks “

Just replace them with < and single quotes, respectively.
You could also just leave out the quotation marks, but I find readability is better using single quotes.

So your amazon code looking like this:

<a href=http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0009WOZBE? ie=UTF8&tag=XXXYZ-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B0009WOZBE>Drei Amen für den Satan</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.de/e/ir?t=XXXYZ-21&l=as2&o=3&a=B0009WOZBE” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;”>

Becomes this:
<a href=”images/image-1.jpg” rel=”lightbox” title=”<a href=’http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B0009WOZBE? ie=UTF8&tag=XXXYZ-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1638&creative=6742&creativeASIN=B0009WOZBE’>Drei Amen für den Satan</a><img src=’http://www.assoc-amazon.de/e/ir?t=XXXYZ-21&l=as2&o=3&a=B0009WOZBE width=’1′ height=’1′ border=’0′ style=’border:none !important; margin:0px !important;’>“><img src=”images/thumb-1.jpg” width=”100″ height=”40″/>
</a>

Rinse and repeat.

Voila, you’ve got adspace times images now.

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I will slowly take the articles that I have published to the wickedfire gay forum onto this blog.

Don’t worry, they will also stay up on wickedfire.

I chose the first one, “A clear inventory“, because again I just stumbled across the issue that prompted me to write it.

Being a webmaster often consists of a myriad of little tasks that have to be done for every domain. It is easy to loose sight of issues surrounding the development.

Read more here

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So I am writing a review for Earners Blog.

First off, I’ll have to admit that I am
doing this because of the contest you’ll find on the site here.

If you want to enter the contest as well,
feel free to join.

Putting the contest aside, I have been
reading earners for quite some time now and always find it a good and
refreshing read.

The topics covered in earners blog are
nothing new. A mix of industry news, blackhat, social marketing, SEO knowledge,
blog marketing etc..

However, the ideas presented on the site often
take a new twist on the affiliate marketing and SEO game. And new ideas are
what makes me want to read a blog. As for this, earners blog is up to par with
Eli’s bluehatseo for me, although the tone is a bit more more mellow.

Even when the topic of the day is nothing
new, earners takes its time to explain the concepts behind the idea, thus making
it a good read for noobs and intermediate marketers as well. Here the mellow
tone helps a lot. This has helped this sorry ape more times than I’d like to
admit.

Those following the path of the ape will
know that general craziness is what I am after. Although not nearly often
enough, this craving gets satisfied frequently while reading earners.

All in all, earners is a blog I’d recommend
for any “must read” list for affiliate marketing, presenting a good
mix of old and new ideas.

Read it and enjoy.

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