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We touched briefly on the ways to increase blog traffic by using relevant images within posts in a previous post. This is a great method of generating additional traffic to your site from search engine image searches. However, how can the inclusion of images contribute to a page’s overall SEO profile? And, moreover, what are some of the recognized best practices when including images on web pages?

Images can be optimizes for various entities (for example, viewers, search-engines, social networking use etc.) which can be said of all forms of page optimization. Here, we concern ourselves with optimization for users/viewers, and for search-engines. There is much common ground, but also aspects unique to each.

Here is a broad checklist for image optimization:

• image relevance – ensure images are relevant to the page content;
• image format – usually jpg and png format; some SEO commentary has suggested a slight bias towards png format in Google image search although this appears not to have been substantiated;
• page title correspondence – matching the page title to the image title and content;
• image title – the image title (or raw file-name) can permit the use of extra keywords; do not waste the opportunity to call an image gone-with-the-wind-cover-scan.jpg instead of DC112092.jpg;
• image alt text – use keyword-rich image alt tags although avoid over-stuffing;
• image size – keep images between reasonable size limits;
• captioning - using captions in WordPress postings seems to increase relevance, though I have yet to fully substantiate this claim;
• keyword vicinity – using your target keywords for the image in the same block level HTML element as the image seems to increase relevance; again, I have yet to fully substantiate this;

The web is a very visual medium, therefore every opportunity should be taken to improve the overall user experience of your site with the appropriate use of images.

I am sure you’ve tried it! I know I have, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my neighbour’s cat has, at some point in one of its 9 lives, even attempted it. Yes, folks, what I am talking about is starting an Internet forum. There are almost as many Internet forums as there are Internet users, but despite this apparent glut of competitors, how can you improve your site’s SE profile and try to gain an edge over your competitors in terms of SEO?

I have used vBulletin, SMF, phpbb, punbb and mybb in the past and after significant use of each, I have decided to standardize my forum building efforts on myBB. To me, it is straightforward and intuitive to manage and customize, has a reasonable range of, and support for, plug-ins and themes, and the free support community always do their best to help out (even if in a markedly high school-ish way at times.)

So I want to talk a little about ways in which we can improve onsite SEO for myBB forums.

There are several useful plug-ins that help with myBB SEO. The first, and most obvious, is the Google SEO mod which incorporates suggestions from Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. The mod requires a little effort to get working flawlessly, but all credit to the author for including several SEO features in to a single mod. This plug-in will enable keyword-rich search-engine friendly URLs, dynamic XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, dynamic META tags generation, automatic 301 redirects for broken URLS and a few smaller tweaks.

In order to avoid PR leakage (and to deter forum spammers), it is a good idea to install an additional plug-in that appends the rel=nofollow attribute to all in post links.

Similar to the above, any extraneous links included in your myBB templates should be amended to rel=nofollow links. Again, this will help prevent PR leakage. You can also use a robots.txt file to prevent search engine spiders unnecessarily visiting and subsequently indexing pages that should not appear in the index – these may include your login page, standard help files, member list and more.

Signatures are always of some concern to forum owners. I tend to tackle this by introducing a clear statement about when signatures are allowed. I use a plug-in to disable signature by default. In order to qualify for a  standard signature, a user must make 10 good posts. The standard signature has rel=nofollow appended to all outbound links. When a user has made 25 or more good posts, I remove the rel=nofollow restriction on his/her signature links. Employing this method has allowed me to gain and retain good PR and ranking on many inner pages. There are several signature related plug-ins for myBB. The one I use at the moment is available at myBB Central.

Here, I have tried to provide a broad overview of some of the ways in which to raise the SEO profile of a myBB forum. I will make additional posts on this topic, delving in to more detail on each of the broad points mentioned above.

One aspect of onsite SEO for blogs is to configure a desirable permalink structure.  Essentially, a permalink is a permanent reference url used for access once the post passes from the first page of your blog.  It is what others will use to link to the post and, perhaps more importantly, the link the search engines will use to identify your post, page or article.  Permalinks should be unique.

There has always been debate about whether, and the extent to which, keyword-rich urls contribute to a pages.  It is commonly believed that keywords in the permalink do indeed contribute to a page’s SERPs.

The structure of WordPress permalinks is dictated by a series of settings and parameters found under the Settings -> Permalinks section, within the administrator console. 

In order to fully optimise the permalink structure, aim to use your tagret keywords in the leftmost position of the url.  In order to do this you’d need a custom structure containing the single parameter /%postname%.  This creates a permalink based on the post title.  It is then up to you  to choose a unique, keyword-rich and compelling title for each of your posts.

Be aware that using just the /%postname% parameter compels you to create unique titles for every post on your blog in order to avoid collisions (where two articles might have the same permalink, clearly not a good situation).

Also, be aware that if your blog is established with numerous indexed pages then your should avoid altering your permalink structure without a full understanding of the consequences.  It will affect your backlinks, trackbacks and ultimately your SERPs.  Usually, optimising a blog’s permalink structure should be undertaken during the early stages of the blog’s development, and before  a substantial content base is developed.

There are several plug-ins available that allow auto-manipulation of post slugs and consequently permalinks.  These often remove “noise” words (such as “the”, “and” and alike) with the belief that increasing the overall keyword density of the permalink, and shifting the keywords leftward, will ultimately increase the link weight.  Although these plug-ins might offer some small SEO benefit, be extra cautious when using these on active blogs for the same reasons stated above.

Later iterations of WordPress offer the facilty to edit the permalink before publishing in a box just beneath the post title when writing it.  This way you can manually create a permalink for the post or manually crop noise words prior to publishing.

The internet is chock full of blogs.  It’s a harsh reality that as the internet becomes more densely populated, rising to the top of the search engine rankings (SERPs) will naturally become more difficult.  However, there are numerous SEO methods available to all bloggers that will help increase search engine exposure.

First, we will consider blog posts.  Each blog post should be tuned to maximise its contribution to the overall SEO effort of your blog.  Usually, each post will appear on the front page of your blog for a period and subsequently be linked to from the front page of your blog.  So it is important that it be fine tuned in accordance with accepted SEO best practices.

For each post, ensure the post title includes its target keyword or keyphrase in the left most position and ensure that you have your permalink structure set up appropriately.

Contribute to the overall crawlability of your blog by linking within context to other articles or post on your blog.  For example, you could start out “In my last post on this topic found here” etc.

If using images and/or links within blog posts, be sure to  include concise and accurate HTML ALT and TITLE tags.

Within the main body of your blog post, attempt to repeat your main target keyword or keyphrase several times.  Some ‘experts’ seem to brand figures of anywhere between 1% to 5% of the overall body text should be keywords.  I have never noticed any empirical conclusions that back up these figures.  But I do recommend repeating your main keyword several times.

Additionally, repeat similar keywords or keyphrases or popular search variants and synonyms of your main keyword or keyphrase.  This will increase your exposure for searches that couple a variant of your keywords.

Where possible and when appropriate, use HTML <strong> tags to emphasize your main keywords or keyphrases.  Some say that this has no overall effect on your SERPs, however, I have noticed some improvement when using this technique in particular situations.  For example, I once had a sports blog and used HTML <strong> tags to highlight inline the names of players.  I used such highlighting consistently for this purpose across the entire blog and mid-term results seemed to indicate that I did start to see more traffic from search engines when these names were used in the search phrases.  Although I do not believe the evidence behind these claims to be entirely anecdotal, the gains might be very small.

The above are pointers that should help you increase organic traffic through search engines.  However, the most important rule to consider for every post is to write clear compelling content for human readers.  Above all, do not get overly pre-occupied with writing for search engines.

SEO activity can be divided in to two broad categories, namely, offsite SEO and onsite SEO. 

Onsite SEO refers to all the methods used in the design and presentation of your site in order to enhance its appeal to search engines and spiderability.  Onsite SEO includes tweaking hundreds of factors that can increase the quality of information search engines retrieve when visiting your site.  There are no magic formulae for these elements, but using them all appropriately can lead to significant gains in search engine rankings.  Onsite SEO factors include (but are not limited to):

• choice of text within HTML h# tags (for example, <h1> or <h3> tags).  Do not overuse h1 tags, one per page;
• choice of text within HTML title tags.  This should be unique for each page on your site;
• keyword density within HTML body tags.  Historically (and, perhaps, anecdotally), a density of 3% to 5% evenly distributed on pages of over 200 words was thought to be near optimal, although this is near impossible to assess objectively;
• strong relevant internal linking.  Breadcrumb style sub-navigation on pages can strengthen internal linking;
• choice of text within HTML META description tag.  This should be unique for each page on your site;
• watch out for broken links within your site;
• keywords in HTML <strong> tags;
• use an up-to-date XML sitemap;
• use an up-to-date HTML sitemap;
• place target keywords high up on the page;
• customize 404 pages to include links back to principal areas of your site’s navigation structure;
• use unique and relevant HTML ALT tags on all images;

These are several of the more important factors that influcence onsite SEO, many of which we shall return to in more depth in ensuing articles on this blog.

Offsite SEO refers to the methods employed to improve search engine rankings by maximizing the influence of factors outside your site’s home domain.  For example, building strong, relevant inbound links from other domains/sites.  The principal object of offsite SEO is quality link building.  Link building has evolved to become a full and separate discipline within SEO and we will return on more than one occasion to tackle the many aspects of link building in future articles on this blog.

Ordinarily, onsite SEO should be undertaken before proceeding to offsite SEO efforts and are usually quicker and easier to perform.  Offsite SEO efforts are usually divided in to mid- to long-term projects.