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It will probably show the link title if the image is wrapped in a link tag and you have no alt tag. Alt tags do have SEO significance - and they do show when you hover on an image. Use normal text

The Alt tag is primarily there for usaility - ie when you hover the user can see the alt information. Therefore write how you would write normal text

Hi,

I'm building an affiliate system for our website, and I obviously want to gain as much SEO benifit from it as possible.

So I am wondering what the optimal solution is with regard to how an affilaite URL is tagged.

After looking into it a bit more - I have come up with the following.

1/. Use an affilaite URL idendifier with a #
EG like www.mysite.com#123

2/. 301 redirect the affilaite URL to the "real URL"
EG www.mysite.com#123      301 ->  www.mysite.com

What do you think of this?

Thanks

This is just a general discussion on your thoughts on the value of obtaining keyword Twitter & Facebook accounts ( especially if you have a brand name not connected to your primary keywords)

For Example:

What do you think the value/benifits are of obtaining accounts such as:
http://twitter.com/#!/keyword
http://facebook.com/keyword

Thanks

Hi,

I'm building our own affilaite system.

I want to make sure I get as much SEO benifit from affiliate links as possible so I am in search of the perfect solution.

My thoughts after doing a bit of research are to do the following - using the # as my identifier:

1/. Use an ID like www.mysite.com/#A123

2/. Redirect via 301 these urls to www.mysite.com

Any thoughts on this, or other things I should be thinking of with regard so building an affilaite system that has strong SEO benifits?

Thanks

I rank well already for these terms (although not always No1) and have the trust.

I really don't want to compromise my design though - and I don't think you should have to for good SEO - IE If its best for the user, then it SHOULD be best for the SE's (in theory of course).

It would be useful to know if anyone has run any tests on this to see if the Title tag can help solve this issue, as it must be a very common issue. I really begruge compromising usability to help SEO, as I see this contraditory to what SE's should be looking for, and if this the case then a flaw in their alogrithm.

Thanks

Hi,

I am wondering on you through relevant to SEO in the following situation.

I have a "travel" website and obvisouls as part of that I have a whole list of desitinations.

So I have a drop down in my page navigation, which lists all my desitinations.

At the moment I see have 2 main options to display the lists as follows:

1/. Perfect Anchors, but not good for usability - IE repeating the word "holiday in a list of 100 destinations, looks spammy for one, and when the headline says "Holiday Destinations", then from a use perspective its pretty pointless and takes away from navigation rather than improves it".
New York Holidays
Las Vegas Holidays

2/. Non Perfect Anchors - But better for usability
New York
Las Vegas

So I am thinking - would the use of the title attribute provide a perfect solution?? Or am I wasting my time with this and it is just pointless considering it as an option.

EG - what I had in mind was:
3/. Ideal Solution for both SEO and usability??
New York
Las Vegas

Thanks for you help in advance.

Many thanks - I'm going to have a serious word with my coders!!

Jesus - Thanks.

So your telling me that its totally invalud to:
1/. Wrap a href tag around a div tag.

2/. Put a href tag as an atribute on a div tag.

If that is the case I'm going to have so serious words with my coders!!

Hi,

I'm looking at my links containers and trying to optimise them.

I would be greatful if anyone can give me some feedback on my plan for perfect optimaisation.

My links are constructed as follows:

I have a two states:
1/. A Non Hover state which contains an Image and Text
2/. A Hover state which contains a bit more text - I do this as containing full text on the non hover state would not be good for users and would look ugly as well.

Here's an example block of the HTML - as you can see from the URL, its quite a deep page level. From the URL and Alt / Titles the Page I am Linking to is about: "The Royal Hotel Accommodation New York Holidays".

I Just a bit confused on how I should apply ALT and Title (Titles in particular) attributes given the nested DiV's etc - I can apply these to parent level, or apply all levels, or apply them to a mix.

Also is there any obvious thinks you can think of I am missing that may help onsite SEO?

Thanks in Advance

CURRENT UNOPTIMISED CODE:

                   The Royal Hotel
           
           
               
                    New York Holidays Accommodation
                    The Royal Hotel
                    

MY OPTIMISED CODE (Adding Title and Alt attributes):

                   The Royal Hotel
           
           
               
                    New York Holidays Accommodation
                    The Royal Hotel
                    

Hi,

I was just wondering what your thoughts are on using a Href in a Div, which contains anchor text. We currently use the Href on the div, as opposed to just the anchor text as I want the whole div to be clickable as opposed to just the anchor text.

So currently I have:

Keword 1
Keyword 2

Is this perfectly fine to do it like this as opposed to using <a tags="" ???<br="">I suppose there are various alternatives - if you must use the</a><a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a>

<a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a>

Keword 1
Keyword 2

However I would assume a search engine is smart enought to know its the same thing???

Thanks

Ok I've done some more testing and here are some other points:

From answers above:
1/. Each synonym set of content is totally unique - I used different copywriters for every different version to make sure there was no duplication. It's also very useful content for anyone looking for "more indepth info".
2/. Each synonym set of content was only scattered with a few keywords about 1-2% for total synonym words.
3/. The content is searchable by SE's (its loaded in a layer hidden by default), opened on click of an info button. I've also checked searching on specific unique strings from the content - Google is indexing the content and page containing the text.
4/. Our "primary" Synonym content pages are still ranking decently, but have just dropped - IE I'm talking drops from position 1-3, to 6-7. The new synonym pages are not ranking anywhere significant for their exact synonym - it is the primary synonym page ranking for them.

Possibilties:
1/. Google is not liking the fact that I have numerous synonym pages, where the only difference is Title and Meta variantions, along with a chunk of content in a layer not visible on page load to the user.
2/. Google is not liking the fact that this content contains synonym keywords that link to other synoynm pages doing the same thing.
3/. Google is re-distributing link juice which was before going to the primary synonym page amongst the 8 synonym pages (as now all synonym pages have links that randomly point to other synonym pages), thus the link juice to the primary synonym page is diluted, resulting in a drop in ranking.
4/. Google is just adjusting our ranking factors in their alogrithm and as with any new site, you would expect some big fluctuation in the first couple of weeks, and there is nothing to worry about??

On point 4 is there any actual study done on what happens to a total redesigned site with regard to rankings and timelines?

Any further thoughts appreciated.
For now I am working on changing:
1/. Content is displayed visible by default
2/. All links within any synonym content point to the "primary" synonym content page.

All advise much appreciated.
Thanks

Hi,

This is quite an advanced question, so I'll go through in detail - please bare with me!

I launched the new version of our website exactly a week ago - and all the key metrics are in the right direction: Pages / Visit +5% , Time on Site +25%, Bounce rate down 1 %.

I work in an industry were our primary keyword has 4 synonyms and our long tail keywords are location related.

So as an example I have primary synonyms like: Holiday, Vacation, Break, Trip (Not actually these but they are good enough as an example). Pluralised versions and you have 8 in total.

So my longtail keywords are like:

Las Vegas Vacation  / Las Vegas Vacations
Las Vegas Holiday / Las Vegas Holidays
Las Vegas Trip / Las Vegas Trips
Las Vegas Breaks / Las vegas Breaks

All these synonyms effectively mean the same thing, so my thinking on my new website was to specifically target each of these synonyms with their own unique page and optimise the meta and page titles, to those exact words.

To make these pages truely unique, I therefore got a bunch of copywriters to write about 600 words unique for every long tail synonym (well over 750,000 words in total!).

So now at this point I have my page "Las Vegas Holidays" with 600 unique words of content, and "Las Vegas Vactions" with 600 words of unique content etc etc etc.

The problem is, when the user is searching for these words, there primary goal is not to read 600 words of content on "Las Vegas Holidays" - their primary goal is to get a list of last vegas holidays that they can search, view purchase (they may want to read 600 words of content, but is not their primary goal).

So this puts me in a dilema - I need to display the nuts and bolt (IE the actual holidays in las vegas) to the customer on any page they land on off my synonyms as the primary content. But to make sure these pages are unique I need to also have this unique content on that page.

So here's what I did:

• On every synonym version of the page I display the exact same information. However, on each page I have a "Information" link. and on click this pop's up a layer which contains my unique content for that page. To further optimise using perfect anchors in this content pop-up, I have cross linked the synonym pages (totally naturally) - IE on my "Las Vegas Holidays" page, in the content I may have the words "Las Vegas Breaks" - this would be linked the the "Las Vegas Breaks" synonym page.

In theory I don't think there is anything wrong with what I am doing in the eyes of the customer - but I have a big concern that this may well look "fishy" to SE's. IE the pages are almost identical to the user except for this information pop-up layer of unique content, titles and meta. We know that Google at least can get can tell exactly what the user see's when they land on that page ( from their "Preview") and can distinguise between user visible and hidden text. Therefore, even though from a user experience, I think we are making a page that is perfect for them (they get the list of vactions etc as the primary content, and can read infomation if they want by clicking a button), I am concerned that SE's are going to say - hold on a minute there are load of pages here that are identical except for a chuck of text that is not visible to the user (Even though this is visible to the user if they click the "Information" button), and this content cross links to a load of almost identical pages with the same thing.

Today I checked our rankings, and we have taken a fair whack from google - I'm not overly concerned at the moment as I expected big fluctuations from ranking for the first few weeks - but I'd be a lot more confident if they were fluctuating in the right direction!!

So what do I do?
As far as I can see my options break down as follows:

Content Display:
1/. Keep it as it is, and hope the SE's don't see it as spammy. Even though I think what we are doing is the best for customer experience, I'm concerned SE's won't.

2/. On every synonym page, below all the list of products, packages etc that the customer wants to see, display the unique content as a block of subtext text which is visble by default. This however could make the page a bit ugly.

3/. Display a visible snippet of the unique content, below all the packages, and have a more button which expands the rest of the content - IE have a part visible layer. This is slightly better for display, but again I'm only displaying  a portion of visible content and the rest will still be flagged as "hidden" by default to the SE's.

Cross Linking within the content:
1/. Keep it as it is where synonym keywords link to the synonym version of the page.

2/. Alter it so that every sysnonym keyword links to the "primary" synonym version of the page - EG if I now "Las Vegas Holidays" is my main keyword, then "Las Vegas Vactions" keyword, would not link to my "Las Vegas Vactions" page as current, but would link to my "Las Vegas Holidays" page.

I apologise for the indepth questions, but it requires a lot of explanation to get it across clearly.

I would be grateful on any of your thoughts.

Many thanks in advance.