SEO Best Practices

Do social Networking sites, such as LinkedIn help in promoting your business?

I would say so definitely!

How is Social networking and SEO connected?

Using Social networking for your business is a step forward in enhancing your web presence. It may not be directly connected to SEO but it certainly enhances your presence on the internet. SEO techniques can be designed to optimize your presence on the networking sites. Social networking sites are easily the most visited and most popular sites today.  Most of us eat, sleep, and breathe social networking. Social networking sites have a sort of viral effect on your business.  You can invite/ add as many people as you like, your friends, your friend’s friends, your family and  more. You contact will multiply and so will your visibility.

Networking sites  let you create a page specific to your business, you can create a group, invite members, get likes, encourage discussions etc. All of these can help give your business the mileage you require. I would suggest that you consider not spamming or being overtly persuasive, just spread your message among your group, and be polite.Remember to promote your Social networking profile, and URL whenever you communicate (through your signature lines) etc.

Marketing and social networking go hand in hand.Marketing your business on the Social networking sites is  a continuous process.

Some of the most popular, Top  Social networking websites as of today are -

Facebook.com
LinkedIn.com
Twitter.com
Myspace.com
Tumblr.com

By having your business page on LinkedIn (essentially a professional networking site) you are increasing your chances of being found. Many people search on LinkedIn by company names, products, industries etc. Even if people do  not know your company name, on searching with a specific keyword, your business may be found. That will bring in new visitors. Also, through your connections in LinkedIn, you can invite more connections and your connections will multiply. Imagine the impact this will have on your business!

If you are still shy of going the networking way, I would suggest you start step by step, it is never too late, but it is becoming essential for every business…big or small to have a presence in the Social networking sites.

Here is a brief summary on LinkedIn:-

Linkedin was launched in May 2003 December and is mainly used for Professional networking.

* A contact network is built up consisting of their direct connections, the connections of each of their connections (termed second-degree connections) and also the connections of second-degree connections (termed third-degree connections). This can be used to gain an introduction to someone a person wishes to know through a mutual contact.
* It can then be used to find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one’s contact network.

The above info is from Wikipedia, for more on Linkedin click here

They say a picture is worth a thousand words!

A SEO optimized image can be very well worth a few thousands of visitors, if not more!

Some of the best practices for SEO that concerns images/ pictures are:

1. Image Relevancy: Images can be used to explain something specific (graphs, data etc) or enhance the layout of the page, and very commonly images are used because they are relevant to the content of the page. Relevancy is one of the key factors when images are optimized. Make sure the image your use are relevant to the content.

2. A good image has a bigger impact on your potential customer vis-à-vis the content. You may want to utilize this fact in order to retain the attention of the visitor. Just using images as it is, may not be enough. A title needs to be provided along with an Alt tag (Alternative text). Try to be descriptive, as in, in a short sentence describe what the image is all about. Your visitors will want to know what the image is all about and search engines index your images. When you provide complete information about the image, it helps both the human visitors as well as the search engine robots since they get the details that they need in order to index your image in their database. When your image is well optimized, it shows up on searching with the keyword on image search.

3. Try to minimize the size of your images, if you are using too many images, they might make your page very heavy thereby increasing the download time of your image.

4. Make sure you own the copyright of the images or you have the permission of the owner of the image to use the image on your web page.

5. Last but not the least, there are a few very good image optimizer tools available, you could give those a try, these image tools compress the size of the images and make them web ready: -
1. Adobe Photoshop : Adobe is one of the best tools available for optimizing images.

2. Online image optimizer : Image Optimizer lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site. Furthermore, you can easily convert from one image type to another. Upload Size limit: 300 kB

3. Riot:  Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT for short) is a free image optimizer that will let you to visually adjust compression parameters while keeping minimum filesize.

4. Web resizer  : lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site. Furthermore, you can easily convert from one image type to another. Upload Size limit: 300 kB

I have mentioned only some of the SEO image optimizing tools, there are many more and what is great is that most of them are available for free. SEO image optimization should form a part of your SEO strategy .