In my last post about images I gave some tips on how to optimise images. There is said that you should:

• Store images in a single directory;
• Use keywords in the file names; and
• Use Alt text.

These still hold true and are very sound ways to make sure that your images on your pages help your SEO efforts. Aside from these though here are more tips. They’re mostly common sense but like in most things the obvious once are the very things we overlook.

• Use relevant images only – Make sure each image you use is relevant to the content near it.
• Size matters – I’m talking about the actual size of the image and not the file size here. File size does matter but you want it to be smaller to make loading pages faster. On the other hand for the actual image size note that search engines think that the bigger the image is the more relevant it is to the site’s content. So do not go making a non-relevant decorative image larger than the important ones.
• Image quality is important – You want to choose good quality images over poor ones. The quality I’m referring to is the clarity, contrast, etc. Of course you have to compromise between quality and file size. Find the right compromise.
• Place important images at the top if possible – This affects not only SEO but also user-friendliness. However in cases where the images accompany a certain paragraph as illustration it is more important to place it near that paragraph since you want the image near the relevant text.

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Panicked the last time you saw the toolbar PR go gray? Don’t worry too much about what you might have done wrong because until now what the graybar really exactly means is still unclear. According to Ann Smarty of Search Enging Journal though some of the things that we do know about the graybar includes the following facts:

Whatever the graybar really does mean Google still hasn’t cleared it up but what’s important is that if you do see the TBPR turn gray just do a quick review on the latest changes you’ve made to your site and assess whether some of the tactics you’ve employed are questionable. Check the usual things that could have gone wrong like being hacked/spammed. If everything’s as it should be then there’s no reason to panic, more likely than not the TBPR will eventually just go back to showing your old PR. We all know that Google constantly tweaks its algorithm so you’ll just have to ride out the changes they might have made.

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Seo Roundtable recently did a poll on “artificial pagerank” and found out that 54% of the 153 SEOs that participated in the survey do believe in its existence. But what is artificial pagerank exactly?

Artificial pagerank is simply a boost in pagerank given by Google to pages to certain pages that do not seem to merit the high ranking due to the (few) number of links. SEO Roundtable became interested in finding out people’s opinion about the issue due to a discussion in Webmasterworld where someone reported having a website that had a PR jump from 4 to 5 even with only one low value inbound link (PR 0). Interestingly other SEOs have come across the same thing with some other pages. Of course, this lead to different theories pointing to the possible reasons for increase in PR including a faulty PR toolbar, Google not showing all incoming links, etc. What stuck the most, since they did make sense are these two replies:

Tedster: My assumption is that this unusual PR boost is one of the ways that Google helps “mom and pop” sites compete – something that Matt Cutts made a side comment about on his blog a few years ago. He never said WHAT Google does specifically, only that they do a few things. Now if we only knew how they identify a “mom and pop”, eh?

Ankit Maheshwari: Was thinking that Google might have started to give higher PR on local parameters. So in place of calculating the importance of a page globally, it has started doing it region-wise. IMO, this might be the next big change that Google might be testing, i.e to have higher PR sites within Geo-specific niches as well that might not be linked by million other sites, however within there niche/region/location are linked by most.

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There are plenty of SEO tools out there but one of my favourites is SEO Toolbar. Aaron Wall has some other good SEO tools but this ones my favourite so far. Its really cool because its very comprehensive in terms of the information it displays. And since it is a toolbar all the information can be seen with just a glance.

Stuff you will learn about the webpage your currently on with just a glance at the basic SEO Toolbar includes the page’s:

• Google pagerank
• Yahoo! Linkdomain – rough estimate of the number of links pointing to the domain
• Yahoo! Link – rough estimate of the number of links pointing to the page
• Number of links from DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, and BOTW Directory
• Sites’s age according to Archive.org
• Monthly unique hits
• Estimated traffic value

And all that with just the basic part of the toolbar! More information can be found in the advanced option (click on the icon) such as site links and page links from .edu and .gov links, social media links, Google cache date, etc. So with just one toolbar I now get all the basic stuff I need to check out site statistics relevant to SEO.

One non-SEO features I like is the ease with which you can turn the toolbar on and off, important to me since I don’t feel like thinking about SEO when reading my friends personal blogs and doing other personal stuff. We need time off from work!

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