February 2009 has been an important month for SEO’s around the world as some theories were put mainstream by Aaron Wall over at SEO Book. A recent debate had been brewing concerning brands getting more priority over less established sites in natural search? Well it seems that such an update has happened as this is something that I have been monitoring in the very competitive industry of “travel insurance”.

I work on SEO for a number of clients in the travel insurance industry and I started to notice strange listings appearing in the top 10 results. At first I assumed it was Google testing something out, I researched the competitors to see if they had received a sudden impact of link juice, which they hadn’t. What startled me was that some of these websites had very few links in comparison to the usual “top dogs” of the industry. Added to that the actual content on these pages was not great usually and the listings looked completely out of place an irrelevant.

What I did notice was that the sites were .gov or a brand I recognised through other marketing channels, i.e. TV, direct marketing etc. As it’s probably been a week since this update has occurred (I don’t care what Matt Cutts says, this IS AN UPDATE). The random brand websites making an appearance seems to change daily and only one or two websites actually change on the first page, however pages two and three are moving all over the place.

To give you an example of what I mean about this update, look at the screenshot below, displaying the top 10 UK results for Travel Insurance, I have highlighted the term travel insurance to show which listing doesn’t belong in the results.

Now I’m sure this will calm down a bit over the coming weeks but this makes ranking for the smaller brands and sites that much harder and the bigger boys seem to have it easy – More to follow.

Areas to keep an eye on that I will investigate:

• Brand anchor texts
• Brand mentions
• URL anchor texts
• Domain age
• Brand Universal Search

How to optimize images for SEO

Quite basic tips I know but to get maximum results for image search it does require a strict process which must be maintained to achieve best results.

Image location

• Don’t save your images in an external location (like an image hosting company)

• Don’t save your images in your root directory (i.e. www.domain.com/photo1.jpg)

• If you have a small to medium sized website I would recommend keeping you images in a separate folder named “images” i.e. www.domain.com/images/photo1.jpg

• If you run or maintain a large website or an e-commerce website then managing images should be more categorised, for example:

www.domain.com/images/cars/blue-car.jpg

Image naming

• Quite obvious but make the image either gif, Jpeg or Png  format

• Use targeted keywords that give accurate representations of what’s in the image

• Using your targeted keywords as image descriptions may up your on page keyword density but this does not portray an accurate representation of what your image is.

• Common image naming structure:

http://www.domain.com/images/keyword1-keyword2.jpg

• Bad image naming structures:

http://www.domain.com/images/photo1.jpg

http://www.domain.com/images/cars/catid29876.jpg

Image placement

I have created a mock to show how I would choose my image placements for a page trying to optimise for Bill Gates + Microsoft. Based on experience image optimisation only really helps when you make the images as relevant as possible to the content you are writing about.

Image Tag

An example of a good image tag (Alt tag) would be:

• <img src=”images/bill-gates.jpg” width=”100” height=”100” alt=”Bill Gates”>

An example of a bad image tag would be:

• <img src=”images/photo1.jpg” alt=”Microsoft’s Bill Gates Microsoft”>

Like I said this is quite basic stuff but think it’s important to be reminded of it at times as I for one have been lazy at times and have not always followed this out.