Google Reads Text - Not Images - SEO Advice

[Dan]

You all know I don't mind helping you guys to rank your websites high in Google, and I don't charge for any advice I can give you. And I even 'go over' people's websites for them if they don't mind me having FTP access, or control panel access if your website uses one.

But I'm getting an increasing number of people asking if I can provide them with SEO advice and improvements they can make to their websites, when they don't have much of a website to start with. I'd pretty much be telling you to get content on it first and then hit me back.

Here are a few key pointers for those who are giving it a go themselves:-

Google Reads Text Not Images
If you have a website with a few images on it, then that's fine. Content is king after all. But you need to have text on your pages too, not just images. Google can't read image menu links, or images with wording in them. Or even images at all to be honest. So you need a few paragraphs of text on your pages so Google knows (as well as your visitors) what that page is all about.

You Need To Tell Google What You Want To Rank For!
Having a paragraph of text on your website that says something like...

Welcome to our wonderful website, here you can read all about us, and find out what we can offer you, checkout our Image Gallery and then our testimonials page and if it sounds like something you'd be interested in then contact us.

... might be helpful for the user, and certainly gets any visitors that do manage to end up on the website looking at your other pages etc.

But when Google reads that, it hasn't a clue what your website is about. It may think it's about an Image Gallery, some testimonials, and you can get in touch. But it doesn't know what people would get in touch for, so it's lost when it tries to choose where it wants to rank you.

If you take a look at any high ranking website, the text on the whole first page (the homepage) will tell the user, and therefore Google, exactly what it does, and where.

So changing the above paragraph to something like...

Welcome to Fred Smiths Tiling, professional wall and floor tiling services based in Greater Manchester. Thanks for finding our tiling website where you can see pictures of our tiling work, along with customer testimonials from our happy customers in Greater Manchester and surrounding area's. If you like the look of our tiling work then please don't hesitate to get in touch with us

... tells Google and your visitor what's going on. Use a BOLD title above that paragraph with the wording "Tilers in Greater Manchester" and you're helping Google and your visitors even more.

A Copyrighter, a Search Engine Optimiser, a Web Designer, or even a leaflet designer can help with wording and what to write where. Though the best place to look is your higher ranking competitors. Take a look at their websites and see what sorts of thing's they're doing to get their website ranked highly.

If anybody would like me to advise them on improvements for their websites then please do feel free to reply to this and I'll take a look for you when I get a mo'.

I'll respond here and then others can see what's worked and what hasn't.

Cheers.

 

[user123]

Interesting Dan!! Didh't know about the image thing.....Once my website will be separate from Howard's you'll be the first to know... :lol:

 

[Brinkley]

Dan i need some help on my website i have a new website that i paid a bit to a company called freestart who said onthe phone that they would design by proffessional designers a site and a domain name for me for 99 quid .
what they said is that they would interperet my website now which is brinkleytiling.co.cc and pretty much turn thenew website which is brinkleystyle.co.uk into roughlythe same lookingwebsite and they assured me when selling this website that it would be google ranked .
not happy at all with the results and their are only 4 different fonts to choose from and i cant understand how to work the site to upload info.
the site i made my first website onwas flash and so much easier now ithink ive been conned as the info told to me was a team of proffessional designers making my website and that they had govnerment funding to do this for a new business

 

[Spud]

Thanks Dan,you really know your stuff with the web site info and seo, thanks for offering this service to the members and for any one who does web based marketing your advice is priceless and really helps

 

[Stewart]

Quality post Dan, thanks.

 

[hillhead]

Right Dan, have a look through mine and rip me to shreads if you want.lol.
Mine is a google site which i built through GBBO.
This is maybe not up your street but if you can do anything it's a bonus.
This could be interesting.

 

[Dan]

Dan i need some help on my website i have a new website that i paid a bit to a company called freestart who said onthe phone that they would design by proffessional designers a site and a domain name for me for 99 quid .
what they said is that they would interperet my website now which is brinkleytiling.co.cc and pretty much turn thenew website which is brinkleystyle.co.uk into roughlythe same lookingwebsite and they assured me when selling this website that it would be google ranked .
not happy at all with the results and their are only 4 different fonts to choose from and i cant understand how to work the site to upload info.
the site i made my first website onwas flash and so much easier now ithink ive been conned as the info told to me was a team of proffessional designers making my website and that they had govnerment funding to do this for a new business

Hey Brinkley,

Firstly checkout this thread here: http://www.tilersforums.com/tiling-forum/46638-web-page-internet.html - it tells you a bit about what another guy questioned regarding paid-for (whether cheap or "expensive") and/or free websites offer you. And it shows you how to choose the one that suits you. The thread isn't long but might take a bit to take in, so perhaps bookmark it and mark sure you come back to it and follow it up. (If you could reply here instead of there, that would probably help others too).

Cheap websites can be okay, but the moment you want to make money out of a website you need to be a league above those types free/cheap style websites.

As on that page, £500 a year on a website will not cost a running business a single penny, it'll actually gain you profit, and even much more than that if its not a highly competitive local area, and especially an area you live in if it's anything above the national average in earnings - those guys have tiling done when they want it done, not when it has to be done for the sake of health & safety. If you live in a nice area, or have some close to you, and a website isn't NO1 but some random directory is - then you tell me, I'll pay for a website to rank there, and I'll take 50% of the cut and pay for the whole website FOR YOU (joke - but that's how I see it - you're silly if you're not taking the chance - but then I hear people of booking £1,800 yellow pages ads and making £200 profit for the annual subscription!!! BEHAVE!).

As for your website (sorry, side-tracked there! lol), .co.cc won't do, that's not for our country. .co.uk, .com and .net at best. If those have gone you probably want to change your company name before choosing a .org, .uk.net, .uk.com, and all other random domains. So your new designers have got that bit right. I wouldn't get into the question of whether they haven't delivered to your expectations or not publically, PM me if you want more on that. But in general to be honest I wouldn't have expected the best for £99. A well optimised website that perhaps has a shop part to it, and a blog part to it, and also staff could login to some customer control area thing, I could believe a price in the region of £100,000, annually. Clearly a tilers website isn't the same, you only want 4 or 5 pages (some traders that do more than one trade could have quite a few more pages than that), you want it to look smart, but the most important thing you want to pay for (and I'd pay for nothing but a package that included this) is to get traffic to it. Not many websites talk about that part that give websites away free or cheap. Even the government funded one that Google its self has gotten involved in doesn't rank at all. That's free. But why? lol - It's worth nothing!!!!

As for the Flash website (adobe flash for those lost here), Google can't read Flash. So I'm guessing your fancy website got you no income so you changed to a cheap / free one instead. Neither will work. Change to the one that does work now, and it'll be the last change you make. More to the point, it'll make you money on a monthly basis. So you'll not just never need to change again, you'll be kicking yourself for not doing it sooner.

David Howe Tiling | Tiler in Durham | North East Tilers - a website done by our sponsor, one you manage yourself but it's pretty easy to get your head around. Sort of like using this forum.
Colour Republic | Painters & Decorators | Kitchen & Bathroom Fitters | Brighton & Hove | East Sussex - this website is worth shouting about. I think if you could put a price on this website it would be in the thousands, 3 or 4 or so to build alone - and then managed. This website isn't a Content Management System (CMS), it's a custom built website in HTML. It's optimised, unique, nobody can manage it but an expert, but it makes money and covers many trades. Rob manages that himself (the guy that runs the decorating & tiling company - not the design company), logo originally designed by his designer friend if I remember rightly (a few years ago now) and Rob's had some help. BUT IT HAS cost Rob is time. He's not the type of guy to leave things in other peoples hands from what I can tell, and although this didn't cost him £3k in cash, it probably has done in time, but I bet you it'll always rank well and if it doesn't, nobody is to blame but Rob and he'd be straight onto it trying again and learning more. (I doubt that day would come, but if it did, he'd have it under control).

And then you get your free sites. Google is changing its algorithm very soon and website that have no original content, or are just "scrapers" that steal other peoples content, will not rank well at all. Free website hosting companies can often fall into this area due to the amateur websites hosted by them limiting the amount of 'good' votes google gives such a website 'group'.

You need to be clever and get online properly asap.

 

[Dan]

Right Dan, have a look through mine and rip me to shreads if you want.lol.
Mine is a google site which i built through GBBO.
This is maybe not up your street but if you can do anything it's a bonus.
This could be interesting.

Joe,

Hey. You rank pretty well to be fair mate. You've been listening. However you can be No1 with a few improvements for about half of those area's you're trying to be No1 for. You've fell into a typical mistake people make when reading all my posts about this, and generally watching how others are doing this, perhaps Dave and his site in this case. Whilst it's good to just list your area's you want to rank for as you do, so "Tiler in XXX1, Tiler in XXX2, Tiler in XXX3" *** being your area's (and nowt rude, sorry) it's probably better to put that in some form of sentence such as "Tiler in MAIN AREA | Professional Wall and Floor Tilers in XXX1, XXX2, XXX3 and surrounding area's" instead. Dave gets away with it due to the amount of links and websites we have related to him and his website, which we tell Google about (in our way), but other tilers websites it could perhaps be a little too forward with there not being so much content on the page with it.

So...
- Put more content on, and mention your area's within paragraphs of all that tile-related new content (PM me if you need idea's)
- Get rid of the tiler in ***, tiler in XXX2, tiler in XXX3 lark and make it a paragraph similar to above listing all area's
- Add a couple more images to the homepage at the bottom fo the content, and within the "ALT Tag" use the wording "Tiling in ***" on one image and "Tiling in XXX1" on the other.
- Get 8 more links into your website from tilers websites - link to your homepage - use the link text "Tiler in ***" (*** being your main key area you want to rank for)

Then give me a shout a few weeks after that.

 

[hillhead]

Cheers Dan, i'll get onto this asap.
I might need a bit of help but i'll have a go and see how it goes.
Top man

 

[Dan]

PM when you need to mate.

 

[Colour Republic]

Thanks Dan you're very kind

Quick one for you, my hosting is up for renewal and I'm thinking of uping my package. In the not too distant future I want to host videos on my own site rather than embedding them from YT, I also want to eliminate downtime (not that i've had any i'm aware of) so with this in mind and to keep speeds up I want to add load balancing. I have one SLQ database and may add more... so a few factors are making me think I'm going to opt for FH's business premium which I think will cost me around £150 for the year.

Now do you think this would be a good idea or do you think I might be better off looking at thrid party hosts which may not have quite so many websites on their servers and also offer loadf balancing??

 

[Dan]

I wouldn't worry too much about load balancing. Checkout UK Web Hosting - UK Reseller Hosting - UK Managed Dedicated Servers - UK Domain Registration Services which is who we use as a forum. Their shared packages are on nice spec servers with no need to do anything above what their standard package offers.

You need to consider bandwidth and diskspace (not a big problem) but downtime shouldn't be an issue in this day and age with any host. And I wouldn't worry about load balancing with most hosting packages it's not anything you'd particularly need.

I can match their packages for you, but it's left with you. Their support might be quicker at times (if I'm away I'm pretty much screwed, they have support available even Xmas day)

 

[Andy Tiler]

cheers for this advice dan could u have a quick look at mine and let me know wat i can improve on.i took your advice on the seo package and installed the lite version,
thanks again.

 

[White Room]

Great information Dan but I will have to look at my book "Idiots guide to technology":lol:

 

[Colour Republic]

The load balancing was more to do with site speed rather than downtime although the added benefit was minimal downtime and the website being backed up on multiple servers.

Site speed has been slowly decreasing over the last few months and that is more to do with other websites sitting on the same server rather than any major changes to my website. I know I can kick up a fuss with fasthosts on that level but I know as soon as I host videos directly on the website then speed will be an issue as will bandwidth.



Currently bandwidth stands at 2gb a month (tiny I know) but again videos will knock that for six. So the load balancing was so that site speeds improve, am I right in thinking that the website would be delivered to users over multiply servers, even the same user? So say somebody was to watch a video it would be supplied by a few servers sending packet data for that video?

I know i'm going for overkill here but I want to make sure I have enough for the year to come rather than getting add-ons like I have done this year.

Now to add an extra element I do plan on getting a few micro websites up and running this year, optimised for one trade or product, i'm thinking there could be around 10+ websites. Colour Republic would always be the most important and looked after but with hosting I may be better to get a reseller package to keep costs down - Maybe the start reseller from your lot??

Lastly do your lot included a analytics programme in the package as I use both google and matrix for that, as both seem to miss some data and the reports I get from both means get a fairly good picture of what is going on once cross referenced

 

[Dan]

I think load balancing is to do with splitting the laod yeah but generally it'll only be your processor and bandwidth hampered by lots of video's being watched a lot. But I wouldn't have thought even if we hosted videos, that even our traffic would watch them all at the same time sort of thing. I seriously don't think you'll have a problem.

And it's nothing to do with online reliability. However it's worth noting most proper hosts (so not the big firms that use their own systems such as 123reg, fasthosts etc) will give you backup many times daily, in our case 4 times daily but I'm pretty sure that could be more or less if we wanted/needed it to be.

Our server has 64bit mysql which helps, we can process twice the requests we used to be able to handle. But again that's nowt to do with video's per se, providing you're not using some database that houses the videos and gets accessed each time the video played. If you're simply uploading them, and then embedding them, that's processer speed and brandwidth you'll be using. Then the diskspace will get munched up over time but you're the one in control of that. You can decrease quality or size of the videos, or you can increase your hosting package. Or a bit of both. (I'd be giving lots of thought to that at the beginning).

UH can upgrade or downgrade your package on a monthly basis if you needed it to. You'd need to keep selecting and actioning that though. UH would transfer you to another server FOC with no downtime at all (you'd just change your DNS for your domain name(s) when told to).

As for the reseller, yeah if you want any more than a few websites then it's sensible to get a reseller, then you can dedicate a certain amount of space and bandwidth for each.

As for stats, yeah, three types of stats. Webalizer, AWStats and some other one. Though I too still use Google Analytics. As with all web stats, they seem to produce different figures but do have the same trends, so I tend to check all (typical - you were expecting a quick solution there and it's just cost you more time lol).

 

[Andy Tiler]

cheers for this advice dan could u have a quick look at mine and let me know wat i can improve on.i took your advice on the seo package and installed the lite version,
thanks again.

sorry dan here,s my website.Andy Carroll Tiling thanks

 

[Dan]

sorry dan here,s my website.Andy Carroll Tiling thanks

I'll take a quick look for you now mate. Just noticed your van though!

Niiiiiiice.

 

[Colour Republic]

I'll take a quick look for you now mate. Just noticed your van though!

Niiiiiiice.

I noticed that the other day and whenever I see another firm employing the nostalgic marketing tactic i'm always a little jealous, it's one of those things that brings a smile to your face and makes you stand out wayyyy out from the crowd.

It's a great van Andy and what looks to be MINT condition!

 

[hillhead]

Pure class there, sweet or what? a real head turner.
Rubber neckers beware.

 

[user123]

oh, Andy, is that a Morris...? - only know the models traveller and minor... but this is lovely!

 

[White Room]

Could'nt you afford a new one Andy:lol:

 

[merit]

hi all
great thread ,just the info im looking at, as im getting my own site sorted,how do i go about getting links on my site and what are the advantages,do these help rankings?

 

[mikethetile]

what are your thoughts on gbbo

I can change the basic template and add new pages, blog pages etc

but how does it fare with ranking, I dont mind directing traffic to it as its free for two years and gives me a chance to play with a website before jumping in with a paid site, I can use it as a shop window but will it rank high enough to pick up passing traffic

 

[Dan]

It uses Google Sites that one doesn't it? They rank okay with a bit of work but not as good as the wordpress type Content Management System (and most other CMS's).

I think we have a couple of members on here that use it.

 

[mikethetile]

yes Dan , its set up by google and bt and is a google product, it doesnt do anything clever but its free for two years and then you have to buy the domain name from bt at their current rate, cant get a price from them, it will do for now, I dont like the standard templates so stuck with the default page which really looks micky mouse but I can change the lot and add pages , I got rid of their icons last night and it already looks better but I will have to make a lot of changes to make it look like what I would want to see as a prospective client

 

[ScottG13]

Thank Dan, great post. You really know your stuff mate

 

[kelleytiling]

Hi Dan - great thread, thanks!
My website is www.kelleytiling.co.uk - my wife made this herself (still a work in progress, need to adjust a few bits like the gallery page, add more/better pics etc.) - but if you have any advice as to how it could be improved, and particularly any SEO advice, then I (and she!) would much appreciate it!
Thanks
James