Look at the two examples below. On the left, the mouse is hovering over a button that links to a page described as Free SEO Tool in the alt tag.

Alt tags are mainly used by people who cannot see images on your website. Im sure you remember the dial-up age when websites took what seemed like forever to open, especially the ones with a lot of images. Some browsers had an option to turn images off. This allowed websites to open much faster. In place of the images were alt tags, describing the image that was suppose to be there. Of course dial-up modems have become out-dated and a thing of the past so why are we still using alt tags?

Alt tags are also used in major search engine algorithms. Search engine robots or spiders cannot read images; however they can and do read alt tags. Alt tags help search engines learn more about your website, especially those that lack a lot of content. If used correctly it will even help your website rank higher. Good and descriptive alternative text should be placed on all images, pictures and buttons according to the Design and Content Google Guidelines.

Alt Tag are also used by Google to classify and index the images from your web sites! Of course that is more important for an Desktop Wallpapers Site like anime wallpapers where you got thousands of pics. But even with smaller sites not related to pictures, it can reprensent a good amount of visitors!

Another good reason to use alt tags is accessibility. People with physical disabilities like the blind want to access your website. The buying power of the blind is in the billions and yes, they are frequent web surfers and home Workers!. However, instead of being able to read content on your website its read to them by the computer using a simple application. They cannot see images or buttons on websites so alt tags allow them to get a good description of the image or button. In country or provinces like In Quebec, Canada, this is a requirement form the government on regarding the big web site to make the sites accessible.

So make it a priority, make sure your web design firm uses good, descriptive alt tags on all of your images. A good way to test your website is to simply rollover all your images and look for alt tags. You can also use our Free SEO Tool to determine if youre missing any alt tags.

this is a very important answer for all of us. Look at it!

Summary:
Question : what kind of directories are seen as a source of paid links and if yahoo and botw directories charges money to list your websites and links then why they are not seen as any other sites selling paid links?Answer : This is more like the regular template answer of matt cutts.

What is the value of a directory. Do they charge money to list your site, what is the editorial value of the directory. How do they list sites, do they only add links that are being submitted or they find links on their own?

If the editorial value is low, means all links submitted are approved then directory is selling paid links. fly by night directories, directories asking for submissions on the basis of page rank etc. directories accepting text, (am sure he means keywords here, or anchor text).

He says yahoo directory has good editorial value so its a good directory.

Source

1. Missing or duplicate meta data – Having no meta data or having it simply repeat the brand is an obvious SEO problem that is easy to fix most of the time. The same goes for duplicate meta data – sometimes the developers will repeat the same meta tags throughout the whole website, which the search engines may read as duplicate content, resulting in a failure to rank.

2. Text as images – Content is king online, so dont lock up your text in Flash or as images, no matter how cool it might look. If you dont give the search engines content to crawl you will have a hard time ranking no matter what else you do.

3. No internal linking – A solid internal linking strategy helps your users navigate through your site and it ensures that the search engines crawl and rank your website.

4. Missing or irrelevant alt tags – If you have images on your site, it is a simple matter to ensure that keywords are placed in your alt tags, and it will definitely have a positive effect on your rankings. Also, it helps users who cannot view the images for whatever reason (they are visually impaired, they have a slow connection, or they are using a substandard browser like IE6) understand the content on your site.

5. No robots.txt file – This file tells the search engines what pages of your site should be indexed and what should be ignored. Even if there are no pages on your site that you want to leave out of the search results, this file is still essential as it helps the search engine crawlers determine what to do with your sites pages.

How to write a good blog comment ?

For write a good blog comment, I have some tips to help you improve quality of your comment and it can help you keep your comment alive without delete or move to spam.

1. Determine Your Purpose

People have different reason to write blog comment. What’s yours ?

• You trying to get back-links, drive traffic to your website ?
• You disagree with someone and want to tell the truth to people ?
• You appreciate and want to say thank you for his/her jobs ?

Sometime, understand your motivation will help you decide what kind of comment you will write about.

2. Understand Content of Article/Post

When I reading some comment in blog, almost of it just :

• Thanks for share that. Great
• Thanks. Pretty good
• It help me so much
• …

I know they just write for their purpose and don’t want to take much time in their comment. Just say thank you and leave, they don’t need to think about article content and what is it talking about. Mainly, comment posted and showing in comment pages.

It’s main reason to delete your comment without confused. Save your time and comment to tell something useful or just give a minutes to think and write good comment. I know you’re not professional writer, I’m not too. But I sure you can write better than others people I tell above. Right ?

3. Make Link Carefully

As I asking above, if you’re make this comment for satisfy your purpose, think carefully before put a link in your comment. Don’t confused to put your link if comment box has a place to put ” Your Website ” or ” URL “. But there are no where to put your link, final way is put link into body of comment.

Is it risky thing ?

If you’re moderator or owner of blog, you see a comment, short comment with irrelevant link , do you delete it ? I sure I’ll remove it and and report as spam for next time. Many people will doing follow my way, then beware.

4. Grammar and Spelling

Not almost comment editor include spelling checker, you should review your comment before submit. How could you tell to people something when you can spell it ?

5. Telling More Information

I know short comment is okay and almost of it will accept by site owner. You say ” thank you ” , ” love it ” or ” pretty good “. Just tell a bit more to people why you like it ? It will make more good point to your comment

Broadcast Yourself. Thats the tag for the Youtube video sharing social network, a video upload site where people can watch, rate and comment on videos uploaded by other users.

Video upload sites have been around for a while now but they are only getting more and more popular these days and have been one of the catalyst of the new web 2.0 movement where users submit the bulk of a sites web content.

These sites are fun and in many ways informative and addictive. Youtube is among the most visited sites on the internet according to Alexa with millions of people visiting the site each day.

There are lots of other sites like Youtube, some of them standalone and some that are on social networks while others are used for a specific purpose.

Video Upload Sites

• FunnyOrDie – Will Ferrel’s new funny video site, lol. Life’s tasty…
• Revver Video Sharing Network – Revver – The first viral video sharing network with original webisodes, animation, comedy, vlogger, gaming videos, and more.
• Youtube – Most popular video upload site.
• Metacafe – Videos and Funny Movies
• Google Video – Google’s video sharing network
• Yahoo! Video – Yahoo’s video sharing portal
• IFILM – Videos, Trailers, etc
• Yommy – Video Shopping/Advertising
• Bolt.com – Upload and Share Your Life
• Break Video – Free videos, humor, comedy, hot chicks & pictures for guys.
• Grouper Video
• Daily Motion – Share your videos
• Veoh Video Network – Online Videos
• Singing Fool – Music Videos
• Video Detective – Movie Preview and Trailers
• Sharkle – Upload and Share
• Putfile
• JobBeam – Video Resume – Upload Your Resume.
• Ziddio
• Brightcove
• LiveVideo.com – The World is Watching – LiveVideo is a video platform that allows you to host videos for free, broadcast your videos, watch funny and sexy videos.

How Video Upload Sites Work.

Video upload sites usually require you to have an account in order to have the full benefits of being a member. Without an account you are restricted to just watching and enjoying the videos although you can still share them.

After you create an account you can then upload your video, which will be hosted on the video upload site, using a special form. Once the video is uploaded it will be given a special url which gives the video a special location on the network.

The user will then tag each video with special keywords which will be used for finding your video and for placing it as a related video to similar ones on the video upload site. This makes finding your video an easy task for other users since it will appear alongside other popular videos with the same tag.

Users can then comment on your video if they like it (or if they don’t) and also rate it (5 stars would be great). The can also grab the url and place it on their own website or page or if its the case of a social network like Myspace, add it to their page. Most video upload sites are also social networks.

Sites like Hubpages.com also integrate videos from these video upload sites so its easy to share your videos across the internet.

About Author : kpfingaz was published this article on Hubpages.com

To rank top in search engine result, there are many things that you can do. One of them is get one way link as many as possible. One way link is a simply a link from other website to your website with keywords anchor text and you don’t have to put their link at your website. This is a nice benefit because it keeps visitor coming to your site through the other website (the website your link is at) and this means you can increased the traffic of your website with minimal efforts.

Why Does One Way Link is Better?
Search engine such as Google mark one way link as a ‘vote’ from other website to your website. It is because if your link is at the other website, that website is certifying the quality of your website and makes your website ranking higher.

How Can I Get One Way Link?
Getting the one way link is the hard part because not many webmaster want to put your link at your website if you just ask. The most important things you can do is produce high quality contents at your website and if the content is related to their website then most likely they can link to your website.

The other thing you can do to get one way link is to do a 3-way link exchange. Most webmaster has more than one website, you can ask them to put your link at their website in exchange you will link to their other website from your website. It’s a win win situation because you have one way link at their website and you give them one way link to their other website.

What is 301 redirect?

301 redirect is the best method to preserve your current search engine rankings when redirecting web pages or a web
site. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”. After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is
noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name. You implement the 301 redirect by creating a .htaccess file.

What is a .htaccess file?

When a visitor/spider requests a web page, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

How to implement the 301 Redirect

1. To create a .htaccess file, open notepad, name and save the file as .htaccess (there is no extension).

2. If you already have a .htaccess file on your server, download it to your desktop for editing.

3. Place this code in your .htaccess file:
redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

4. If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it, skip a line, then add the above code.

5. Save the .htaccess file

6. Upload this file to the root folder of your server.

7. Test it by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location.

Notes: Don’t add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:

redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)

/old/old.htm (the original folder path and file name)

http://www.you.com/new.htm (new path and file name)

When the search engines spider your site again they will follow the rule you have created in your .htaccess file. The search engine spider doesn’t actually read the .htaccess file, but recognizes the response from the server as valid.

During the next update, the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, plus some fluctuations in rankings. According to Google it will take 6-8 weeks to see the changes reflected on your pages.

Other ways to implement the 301 redirect:

1. To redirect ALL files on your domain use this in your .htaccess file if you are on a unix web server:
redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com

You can also use one of these in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
redirect permanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
redirectpermanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html

This will redirect “index.html” to another domain using a 301-Moved permanently redirect.

2. If you need to redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com and you’ve got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

or this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Tip: Use your full URL (ie http://www.domain.com) when obtaining incoming links to your site. Also use your full URL for the internal linking of your site.

3. If you want to redirect your .htm pages to .php pages andd you’ve got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php

4. If you wish to redirect your .html or .htm pages to .shtml pages because you are using Server Side Includes (SSI) add this code to your .htaccess file:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html .htm
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html

Frequently Asked Question:
What’s the difference in using a 301 redirect versus a meta redirect?

Meta Redirect
To send someone to a new page (or site) put this in the head of your document:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”10; url=http://mynewsite.com/”>

Content=”10; tells the browser to wait 10 seconds before transfer, choose however long you would like, you can even choose 0 to give a smoother transition, but some (really old) browsers aren’t capable of using this so I’d suggest putting a link on that page to your new site for them.

With a meta redirect the page with the redirect issues a 200 OK status and some other mechanism moves the browser over to the new URL. With a 200 OK on both pages, the search engine wants to index both the start page and the target page – and that is a known spam method (set up 10,000 domains full of keywords for the search engines to index then meta redirect the “real visitor” after 0 or 1
seconds to the “real site” ) so using it gets you penalized.

The 301 redirect simply issues a Permanently Moved message in the HTTP header which tells the search engine to only
index the target URL.

Conclusion: The safest way to redirect old web pages to the new pages or old web site to the new web site and keep the same search engine rankings is to use the 301 redirect. It will also pass on the page rank from your old site to your new site.

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a word that is going to be placed in your article several times, not just once as that would make every word a keyword. When a spider sees that you have a word placed several times in an article, it will determine that your page may be useful to users that search for such a keyword.

Over Optimizing Your Articles

It is important to note that there is also such a thing as over optimizing your articles for particular words, this is known as keyword stuffing. When you stuff keywords in an article a spider will detect that you are trying to trick it into placing your article high in the search engine results for that word, and will instead penalize your site and your page for doing such. This may even affect the rankings of your other pages or get your site blacklisted from a particular search engine if you are found keyword stuffing too many times.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is how many times your keyword is placed in your article. Most use a percentage to determine how many times they will put a keyword in an article. For instance, if you have a 500 word article and want to achieve a keyword density of 5%, then you will need to have the keyword in your article exactly 25 times. You can find hundreds of resources and guides recommending one keyword density over another and the reasons behind the logic, however, in the end you will have to determine which density is more profitable for your articles. Each webmaster as their own density that they like to achieve based on past results. As long as you dont over optimize and you are making sufficient profit from your rankings, then you can choose whatever keyword density you like.

The Right Density

No matter what exact density you choose, it is important to place keywords so that there are more at the beginning and end to produce an hour glass effect. Having the right keyword density in your article makes it more likely that you will make money off of that article because it will rise in the search engine results and be seen by more people.