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.

Benchmarking is a necessary action when working on any aspect of SEO for a website. For those of you who don’t know what benchmarking is – Benchmarking is an action whereby you record specific metrics of success over periods of time. For example one of these metrics could be search engine rankings.

Without benchmarking how would you determine the success of a strategy? You need to capture results for whatever metric to be able to show how your SEO initiatives have affected your clients website.

Some examples of SEO metrics I use to assist with reporting and monitoring performance are:

1.    Keyword Rankings
2.    Search Engine Traffic
3.    Referral Traffic
4.    Direct Traffic
5.    Cache Dates
6.    Index Percentage Penetration
7.    Time on Site
8.    Page Views
9.    Time of Visits
10.    Day of Visit

How to perform Benchmarking?

The only accurate method of benchmarking in my eyes would be manually. Ok, this may be time consuming on resources but accuracy matters. Obviously some of the metrics I have discussed above can be captured effectively by Google Analytics which has the awesome price tag of free. However when tracking keyword positions over major search engines there are alternatives to doing the work yourself.

I have used the following three pieces of software, all with positives and negatives but in case you are unfamiliar with them I’ll give you a short piece about each.

Authority Labs

These guys are the new kid on the block if you will – I originally picked up on this resource by Raven SEO’s blog. It’s a web based system which allows you to add domains with each of the keywords you want to benchmark for very easily. The software will even provide you with recommendations of keywords if your own keyword strategy is not available. Then every 24 hours data is updated, and will show you any increases and decreases over Google, Yahoo and MSN. A great little feature which I love is the graphical representation of keyword progress over time, you can see very easily influences that you might be implementing taking effect. They offer a free tester with limited keyword tracking and they have a tonne of features in the pipeline so I suggest you guys check it out.

Rank Checker

Rank Checker is a Firefox extension free to download by SEO Book. This tool is great for estimates – you can add as many domains and keywords as you like and you can check over a number of different territories for Google i.e. you can see differences between Google.co.uk and Google.com. Depending on the number of keywords this tool can take a while to give results but when the checking is finished you can download a CVS format of the results which will display all data each time you have benchmarked. Like I said this tool is great for estimates, I find the ranking positions to be quite inaccurate at times, so I wouldn’t recommend using the data for reports – but for monitoring this is great!

Web Position Gold

These guys have been around for a long time and it shows with the level of detail that can be obtained by this bit of kit. It’s the most expensive (although you can take advantage of their free trial). You can enter virtually unlimited domains and keywords and get pre designed reports at a click of a button showing all kinds of keyword activity and recommendations. It’s a bit tricky to get started but once you get a complete understanding of how it works, this is a necessity for any SEO.